


Under Wraps

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, Bisexuality, Drama, Episode: s09e15 Ethon, Established Relationship, Graphic Sex, M/M, Season/Series 09, Talking, Wordcount: Over 30.000, flaccid penis play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-28
Updated: 2008-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:14:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack and Daniel think they have an open relationship, but in fact they have just the opposite, and it's killing both of them.</p><p>Referenced/described m/f encounters and involvements. Lot of talk!porn in this one. Lot of the other kind too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under Wraps

Daniel saw the doormat flipped over and knew that Jack was inside. He hesitated for only a second before he unlocked the door and went in; at this quiet early-morning hour, Jack would have heard his car, heard the elevator, heard his approaching footsteps even on the carpeted hallway floor, even if he was sleeping.

He didn't look around when he came in; if Jack wanted to be seen, he'd be lounging in sight, and if he didn't, Daniel wouldn't see him if he looked, but find him waiting like a surprise in one of the other rooms. Even though it wasn't a surprise, because the doormat was flipped over.

Jack's arms came around him as he dropped his keys in the dish on the entryway table. Jack hated him leaving his keys and wallet there, easy pickings for anyone who got through the front door for a quick in-and-out. He'd have hated it even if Daniel's keyring didn't also have keys to Sam's place -- not Jack's anymore, not since Jack's team broke up -- and if his wallet didn't contain an SGC ID keycard. Jack hated anything that left Daniel vulnerable. Daniel didn't think Jack had ever figured out that he was the main thing that left Daniel vulnerable, although Daniel had been keenly aware, for a long time, of being Jack's Achilles heel.

"Hey," Jack said, kissing into his neck.

"Hey," Daniel said. Softly, happily; he couldn't help it. But then: "I need a shower."

"You so don't," Jack said, inhaling Daniel's neck.

Daniel hesitated, again only briefly, and then said in a quiet voice, "I really do."

It was only a moment before Jack stiffened, but even that was a long time for Jack. He was usually lightning-fast on the uptake. That was bad. It meant he'd been blindsided. It meant that he'd figured Daniel had worked through Friday night at the SGC. It meant that, despite all the water under the bridge, this wasn't a situation he'd anticipated.

Jack's arms dropped away. It was a letting-go, not a not-wanting-to-be-touching-him-now. He didn't say _I see_ or _Should I go?_ or _Ah. My timing sucks, huh_. He said, "Mind if I hang around?"

Which said that sex was a hoped-for ancillary benefit of a visit that had some other primary purpose.

"Of course not," Daniel said, turning to him, shrugging out of his light jacket. "It's good to see you."

He meant it. It was beyond good. The sight of Jack filled him with love and happiness and arousal, every time, whether they'd been apart for weeks or he'd just come back from putting out the trash. He felt himself muscling down the enormous smile that hijacked his face, automatically, at every sight of Jack. It came from longtime habit of not beaming at Jack like a lovestruck fool, but in this case he realized that it was also because smiling felt somehow wrong, given that he'd just told Jack what he'd just come from doing. He'd told him deliberately; there were a dozen ways he could have slipped off for a shower without telegraphing that the reason was that he smelled like sex down under his clothes. A smile, after that, seemed like a bad idea. But it was hard not to smile. Hard not to throw arms around Jack, crush him tight with relief and happiness. As automatic as the smile and his suppression of it, _I miss you so much_ went through his mind, in so many words. _I miss you like hell. I miss you all the time. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. Come home._ He knew he'd telegraphed his recent activities in order to punish Jack a little. For leaving him. For waltzing back in whenever he felt like it and assuming that Daniel would be waiting, welcoming. A partnership that could assume a thing like that was a gift, a treasure. Not something to lob petty vengefulness at. He should have let the smile bloom; maybe Jack would have taken the truth from it, _he can fuck whoever he wants but I'm the one who makes his face light up like that_. But it was already too late.

"Hey," Jack said gently, some flicker in Daniel's eyes alerting him to the inner conflict, even though Daniel had years of practice at hiding his internal processes and even though less than two seconds had passed. "It's OK." He smiled. It almost hid the glint of pain. "Go take your shower."

That glint of pain -- that was new. Or maybe not new, only previously unobserved. Had something changed? Again? Daniel covered a frown by opening the little coat closet to hang the jacket up. He didn't want to have a big fidelity talk right now. He didn't want to sleep with anyone else, but Jack wasn't _here_, god fucking dammit, and when something simple and pleasant came along he didn't stop it. He'd always been pretty free with his body, and over the first couple of years with Jack he'd just continued to be, the same as Jack had kept the faithful habits of his marriage. Somewhere along the way he'd discovered that Jack was really the only person he wanted to be with, and had his moronic post-ascension epiphany that the only time he didn't feel like shit after sex was when the sex had been with Jack. Then Jack decided to take the job in D.C., not coincidentally right after a several-week-long relationship with Kerry Johnson that Daniel followed with a flash-in-the-pan fling with Sabrina Gosling, and two years of for-all-practical-purposes monogamy came to an end. Jack had women in Washington. Daniel went back to falling into bed with other people and feeling like shit afterwards. Maybe something _had_ changed, on Jack's end. But Daniel felt like shit right now, and he didn't want to deal with this.

He didn't want to deal with Jack's shit at Jack's convenience.

"You know," he said, his voice icing over, watching Jack's eyes harden in instant response to the tone, "how about sometime you try calling first. Or how about we just try making plans _in advance_, and if they fall through it's tough. Or how about we just stop playing this game where we pretend this thing we have is some remarkably tolerant mature arrangement."

"Says the guy who doesn't want me smelling the woman he was just with?" Jack said, with the mildness that was his equivalent of Daniel's iciness.

"Or that that bond is so strong," he went on, with a touch of mocking singsong, "that affairs on the side don't affect it at all." He didn't miss the fact that Jack knew it was a woman. It wasn't a guess. Jack had smelled it on him, once his senses were put on alert.

The mildness in Jack's voice hardened to match his eyes. "Except you wanted me to know, because you sure as _hell_ know how to cover when you want to."

He went ahead and finished: "Or that heterosexual sex doesn't count."

"Do we have a serious problem here," Jack said, "or are you spewing random crap at me because you're pissed that I just show up? My guess is you feel like shit after last night and you're taking it out on me, but I give _way_ better argument when I know what the fuck I'm arguing about."

Daniel turned and leaned back against the door with a thump so that he'd give a genuine answer instead of just returning fire. He took a couple of deep breaths, considering. Then he said, "I hate this. I hate everything about it. It's not working for me anymore. I don't think it ever did. It's been making-the-best-of-a-bad for a long time. But I'm not willing to end it. I'm not capable of ending it. I'm happy that you're here and that pisses me off. I'm trying not to be happy that you're here. For god's sake, Jack, you were on a fucking plane while I was ... If I knew you were coming I'd have saved it for you. What the hell does that make me?"

"A guy that I fuck over, day after month after year. Same as he does me."

"Yeah. I suppose."

There was a long silence. Jack leaned against the wall, on his shoulder, arms and ankles crossed. Daniel leaned on his door, trying to shut out the particular intensity with which Jack was looking at him -- like a predator sensing weakness, an opponent glimpsing a chink in the armor, something. It was weird. He wanted to know what it meant. He was too angry to be willing to care.

After a while, he said, "The real reason you came here. How long is it going to take to cover whatever it is?"

"Long enough that for that we should sit down."

Daniel nodded, and didn't move.

Jack didn't move either.

"Will you try something for me?" Jack said, after another minute.

"What."

"Will you think your thoughts out loud instead of just in your head?"

"I'm not really thinking. I'm hoping to be a reasonable, calm adult again at some point. I'm waiting for the transformation to occur."

"You are always thinking. You're not saying, because it'll bug me or it's something you really _don't_ want me to know or we've been over it before. You're self-censoring, all the time. Except just now you did something else. When you were saying how much you hate this. For a minute there I think maybe I was getting the raw feed."

"So?"

"So, would you purely as an experiment try that again?"

A programmer who'd gotten a foot in the door. That was the look Jack had been giving him. Not a boxer seeing an opening; a detective or attorney perking up with focused interest when a new witness to a wrapped-up case came walking in out of the blue. A historian interrogating a fresh primary source. An archaeologist stumbling on the entry to a secret chamber.

_You think you can solve the puzzle of me, huh,_ Daniel thought, viciously angry. Angry enough to spew all the truth Jack wanted. _Good luck with that. Knock yourself out. Here you go._

Without moving, he said, "I'm thinking that I must be pretty fucking pissed at you in general to take the tone of the wounded party when I'm the one who just rolled out of someone else's bed. I'm thinking about how easily this could escalate out of control. I'm thinking that I wouldn't mind you doing women if I could be there while it's happening. What hurts me is the exclusion and that I'd be excluded even if you weren't fifteen hundred miles away. Any time you have sex with someone else, no matter how casual it is, it's an intimate act that puts me on the outside. Which goes to say that I'm trying to figure out what bothers me about it, because I don't think I feel possessive about you -- unless that's the definition of it -- and I know I'm not afraid that you'll stop feeling what you feel for me, and I think my fear that you'll fall in love with someone else is a separate issue from that sense of excludedness. I don't like that I feel this way and if I could understand it better maybe I could make it stop. I'm wondering if I was wrong last year when I thought I was OK with the thing with Kerry. I'm comparing all of it to my marriage to see if the differences shed any light; Sha'uri had sex with other women for the first few months we were married and it didn't bother me this way. I wanted to take part in it, watch it or actively participate, but that was a craving that didn't carry any resentment or left-outness. I was really fine with her doing it, I just would have been finer if I could have played too. But I loved her in a very different way from the way I love you, and the gender dynamics are different, so maybe it isn't a useful comparison. Maybe I'm overthinking and overcomplicating to avoid facing that I'm just plain jealous, or because I don't fundamentally understand what jealousy _is_. I'm pissed that you took that fucking job and I'm pissed that I'm pissed about it, because I should be bigger than that. I'm pissed that I hurt you and I'm glad that I hurt you and I'm ashamed of that and I still think maybe you deserve it and I wonder if that's justified or if I'm becoming even more of an asshole than I was before. I'm thinking that you think I'm a puzzle that has a _solution_ and I _am_ an asshole and there _is_ no solution and I'm looking forward to _watching you fail_." He looked over at Jack. Raised his brows, slowly. Cocked his head. Waited.

Jack waited too. Jack hadn't moved either. He raised his brows right back: _Go on. Go ahead._

"You don't really want me to go on."

"You have no idea what I want," Jack said immediately -- pouncing, because he'd only been waiting until he made Daniel say the words, those exact words, out loud. "Do you want to find out?"

Daniel sighed and let his head fall back.

Silence wasn't assent -- it was just weariness -- but Jack went right on anyway. "I want to know what you're thinking, as often as you can stand telling me. I want to not be excluded from your head anymore. You have always held back from me. I'd have an easier time chewing my arm down to a bloody stump than talking about feelings, I _suck_ at it, but I try, for you, all the time, it's the thing I try hardest at with you all the time, and all you ever do is cut me out. If I exclude you from my sexual life by sleeping with a woman every few weeks, you exclude me from your mental life _every fucking minute of every day_. You're unfaithful to me with your own _brain_. Your love affair is with your own head. I _do_ feel garden-variety jealousy -- but it's you-and-your-head that makes me nuts. You never told me everything, you always kept sixty percent of yourself back, but you used to tell me _some_ things. You'd sleep with somebody and tell me all about it and what mattered to me was that you let me _in_. It was something you wanted to do and if you knew it bugged me you'd stop and so I hid the fact that it did. I was grateful to have what I could have of you. I eroticized the jealousy into secondhand voyeurism. Then you stopped screwing around but you also stopped talking to me. When you came back from la-la land you remembered that we used to fuck and you remembered that you loved me but you never remembered how to talk to me. You never, ever remembered."

Appalled, barely comprehending, Daniel said, "Are you saying that that's why you took up with Kerry and that's why you went to Washington? Is that what you're saying to me? Is that what you're laying all that on?"

"You left me three years ago, Daniel. You just keep sleeping with me sometimes. You kept loving me, I know that. But you were gone. Or ... you never came back."

_"Why didn't you say something?"_

He'd yelled it. Really yelled it, something he almost never did. Jack didn't even blink.

"I did," Jack said quietly. "Over and over again, as many different ways as I could. Every time, you'd either initiate sex or you'd say something like 'You don't really want to hear this.' You decided I didn't care. You ignored or rebuffed every attempt I made. I'd say 'Whatcha thinkin'?' and we'd never get past 'It doesn't matter.' I'd say 'Penny for your thoughts' and you'd say they cost a buck and change the subject. When you responded with sex I thought that was your answer, you were talking with your body, but after a while I could see that it was just a way out. I started to feel like demanding that you open up to me was ... like demanding sex. Forcing it would be like rape. You wanted to keep yourself inside yourself. I did tell you, Daniel. I did ask you. But I wouldn't force you."

"Do you know," Daniel said, his voice taut as a wire, "how many times in the past ten years you have told me to shut up?"

"No," Jack said. Not an answer -- a denial. He raised a finger so sharply it was like cocking a fist back to strike. "Not at home. Never at home."

Daniel watched the finger drop away as if it had been pointing at the answer he couldn't see to a question he didn't know how to ask. "So Kerry, and the job, those were -- what, attempts to get a response from me?"

"Kerry was an affair, Daniel -- classic, clichéd affair, indulged in weakness by a guy who didn't have what it takes to fix things at home. I let you believe it was about sex _expressly_ so that it wouldn't come off as an attempt to leverage you. She wasn't 'Daniel, open up to me or I'll find someone who will.' She was cute and fun and easy and smart and a pretty damn straight shooter considering the whole, you know, spook thing, and when she was with me she was _with_ me. If I'd been in love with her I might have even tried to hang on to her. I might even have finished with you and settled for her, and thank christ she has too much on the ball to let anybody do that to her. I didn't fight when she called it, but I wouldn't have ended it unless things changed with you. If I told you? -- well, _that_ would have been to get a response. So I never told you." He shrugged. "Maybe I should have. Can't change that now."

"And the job?"

Jack's voice got quieter. Tireder. "The job I took because it was killing me being right next to you when you were always someplace else. You say you can't end it -- well, I can't either. But I had to get out. I thought you wanted to go to Pegasus but you weren't saying one way or the other, so when I had a chance to leave I took it. There were other reasons -- I hated commanding the SGC and I can't go back Out There 'til both knees are fixed and I knew that no matter how much I hated the D.C. job it would be an effective deployment and I'd get some important stuff done. But mostly it got me away from us. The women out there ... " He made a vague, spiraly gesture. "They're there. Sex is a tool, a weapon in the armory. Sometimes it's expedient. No feelings, no hardship." His voice went even lower, throat-straining low -- the range it dipped into when he was forcing out every word. "I wouldn't even consider it," he said, "if I could make love to you without you shutting down on me. I'm not blaming you, I'm explaining to you. I think this time maybe you're even listening, processing, but I can't tell. I expect this to end like every other conversation I tried to have about it. But that's why Kerry and that's why the job. Not to hurt you. Not to leverage you."

"You hate talking about feelings," Daniel said, in an agony of trying to make sense of this.

"With anybody except you. You are the exception. I've told you that a hundred times. I've shown you that a hundred times. I'm showing you right now."

"You just said ... you'd rather chew your arm ... "

"I said I suck at it. I said it's hard for me. It's work. Sometimes it's torture. But I don't hate it. Not with you. What I hate is that _you never fucking answer me._"

"You do it to make me happy. To make me feel better. I took it for a ... a, a, a gentle lie. I thought you meant you'd try no matter how much you hated it. I tried to spare you that. Over and over again. I thought ... every time ... I thought you were just ... making an effort. Hoping the offer would be enough and I'd never take you up on it. _I shut down so I wouldn't drive you nuts with all my shit._"

There was a very, very, very long silence. Finally Jack said, "If that's the case, we have massively fucked up here."

"I think we've massively fucked up here."

"You should have taken me at my word," Jack said softly. Then, louder, harder, like a groan, "Christ, Daniel, christ -- why couldn't you just _take me at my word_?"

"Like your word about being cool with me sleeping around? Like your word that Kerry was no reflection on me, we were solid, you just missed women? Like your word that you accepted the D.C. posting _after_ I signed on for Atlantis?"

"OK, not those words, no. OK. Fuck. OK."

"We always pick and choose. What to take, what to leave. What to give, what to hold back. That's how the human mind operates. It filters. It's designed that way, for good reasons."

"We have to do better than that."

Daniel laughed, bitterly. "You and me? That's a joke, right?"

"No. We can beat this."

"What -- no lies, ever? No evasions, no half-truths, no lying by omission or for the good of the other person?"

"Yes. Laying all the cards on the table. _All_ of them, good or bad, whether they make sense or not, whether they hurt or not."

"It's a prisoner's dilemma."

"In which case reciprocity oughta take care of it. Do unto the next guy as the last guy did unto you."

Daniel looked up sharply. Jack gave him an _oh, come on_ look in return. Jack was right; stupid of _him_ to assume that Jack wouldn't be familiar with a theory like that, between his job and his general breadth of knowledge. He should have stopped being surprised by stuff like this a long time ago. But sometimes he could still be blindsided too. "One party has to forgive, sometimes," he said. "For it not to become the Hatfields and the McCoys."

"Already have, Daniel," Jack said softly, "or I wouldn't still be standing here. And so have you, or you'd have changed the locks on the door."

"You'd still be standing here," Daniel said, with a wan, mirthless smile.

Jack lifted himself off the wall a little, but not to rise to the breaking-and-entering bait. "You'd have to stop thinking you have all the answers. You'd have to stop answering the questions before you even asked me."

Daniel stood, too, just a little, coming off his slump against the door. "You'd have to stop trying to protect me."

"That's a hard one."

"They're all hard."

"Is it worth it?"

"Yes."

"Is it?"

"It's worth it, Jack."

"But with conditions."

"Like what?"

"Like, only if I bail on the job so we can live together. Like, only if we promise to knock off the sexual sidelines. Like, only if we neutralize the Avon ladies from hell."

"No. No conditions."

"You're always calculating conditions."

"How do you know that if I never open up to you?" _Fuck. Still pissed here._ "Sorry. I'm still pretty pissed."

"Just keep talking. Conditions?"

"You ... You know, you do know me better than I like to admit, and I do feel more comfortable when I think I'm keeping things close to the vest. Yeah, I'm extrapolating scenarios, but I'm not considering conditions to impose. The three things you listed, those are things we'll have to work out together, under the revised operating procedures."

"By being straight with each other. Full disclosure."

"Yeah. That has to come first. Before we can decide what to do about who works where, whether to come out, whether sexual fidelity is feasible or necessary. If we put it off 'til we've beaten the Ori, either we'll never do it because we'll _lose_, or we'll beat the Ori the way we beat the Goa'uld and a new threat will come along and we'll just put it off again."

"Maybe we can slip it in between battles for galactic domination."

"Is that what you'd rather do?"

"No. I want to start now."

"OK. Me too." Daniel rolled so that his shoulder was against the door, so that he was facing Jack. "Can we sit down now, maybe?"

Jack smiled at him -- a genuine Jack smile, the kind he hid from everyone else. The sweet closed-mouth curve of lips that softened his hard eyes and chased the weariness from his face and made him heart-stoppingly handsome. "We could have make-up sex first."

"I'm still ... " A variety of humor-blunted terms came to mind, but he couldn't bring himself to use any of them, or even just say it outright. He'd wasted himself, disappointed a woman who'd thought there'd be more to him than there was, and now he was falling in love all over again with the only person he wanted to be anything _for_, and it was too late to take back the night. It was futile to be this angry at himself for putting up with Jack breezing in and out.

" ... worn out from last night?" Jack finished for him. "Or this morning. Or both, in which case I'm shit outta luck."

"No. Wow -- no. I meant that I still reek of sex with somebody else, and I still feel ... guilty, resentful, pissed that I wasted it, pissed that you didn't give me a heads-up you were on the way, pissed that if you had I'd have held off to suit your schedule. Pissed that I still want you. Pissed at you for being so fucking handsome, and knowing it, you son of a bitch."

"Huh," Jack said. "I misread that."

"God, Jack. I'm sorry I hurt you and I'm glad you were hurt. I'm such an asshole. _You're_ such an asshole. I'm an asshole for thinking you're an asshole. This is so ... "

"Fucked up, yeah. But I _am_ an asshole. And what you just said, that's what I want. I don't care how convoluted it is. I just want to know what the hell is going on in there."

"I'm not worn out," Daniel said. "I came one time, if that's the information you're after, and not very memorably." He closed his eyes, swallowed; this really wasn't easy. Was it ascension that had changed him from the guy who used to be able to talk to Jack about this stuff? Or was it finding out how much it sucked to be on the other side of that when Jack told him about Kerry? Was it increased detachment or increased empathy? _Say it,_ he thought. _Speak. Use your words, Daniel._ Awkwardly, he forced out, "It was nice, she's a nice person, it was nice when it started but I didn't get much out of it. I spent most of it trying to make it nice for her. Trying to be less of a letdown than I knew I'd been at dinner." He stuck his hands in his pockets, keenly conscious of having mostly used his hands. He was good with his hands, good with foreplay, creative about alternatives to penetration, and she'd come twice before he entered her. She'd seemed happily on the way to a third climax when she angled her head suddenly to look him in the eyes and all the arousal in her body just went dead. So he'd dropped his head to conceal whatever it was and used his hand again, gently, holding still inside her, but when her body started to respond she'd tugged his arm out from between them and grabbed his ass and contracted around him and worked her hips hard to get him to come -- to get it over with. He came mechanically, going through with it to avoid insulting her with the 'It's OK, it's not you' conversation on top of the 'It's OK, you go ahead,' 'I'm sorry, let me pull out, we'll do something else,' 'No, really, I want you to' exchange they'd just had. After that all he remembered was the 'god, _finally_' twinge of ejaculation and the bad sleep and the bleak waking-up, and her palpable relief when he offered to go and shower at home. He didn't know how much of that Jack would want to hear. It didn't seem remotely eroticizable. "It's always like that. It's never anything like what we do. I hate admitting that."

"Don't wanna pander to my competitive side?"

"I want you to think that I can get as much satisfaction from other people as you do."

"Well, I don't get a whole lot, Daniel. Really, really don't. What else were you thinking just now? I swear I won't always hassle you like this, but tell me this time."

"Just when?"

"When you were saying you're not worn out and it was nice."

Daniel thought back. "It reminded me of how we used to -- how I used to tell you about things like this. I was thinking about what you said about how I stopped talking to you. I was wondering if it changed because I ascended. If it's changed even more because now I've done that twice. I was wondering if it fucked me up in ways I'm only beginning to see. I was wondering if I can ever be that guy again, who used to lie there with you and tell you things like that and believe you wanted me to. I was wondering if it wasn't ascension so much as Kerry. It's ... embarrassing to say this, and maybe it'll make you feel bad, and maybe it _should_, I don't know, but in the, in the spirit of ... full disclosure ... that ... hurt me. Partly, I suspect now, because I knew that I was withholding what you needed, but maybe not, maybe I'm retroactively superimposing that knowledge. And I was thinking about last night, and how much detail I should go into. Whether you'd believe me if I told you it was just depressing. Which it was. Which they always are. Definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome." He stopped the next words, then stopped stopping, and finished: "Which applies to this too."

Jack nodded. "OK. Thanks. For the answer."

"If I always tell you _everything_ that's going through my head -- "

"I know. I don't care. It's better than being than shut out." Jack pushed off the wall. "Look, I'm gonna go get a drink and sit down. You don't have to shower on my account. I think maybe I'm as turned on by the idea of you with this woman as I am jealous, seriously, so the shower's up to you."

Daniel followed Jack into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee while Jack poured himself an orange juice and chugged it. Then he turned and pushed into Jack's arms. They both groaned, and tightened on each other, and hardened up against each other, and thrust, hard, and muscled closer, tighter; Jack was shaking, and his head dropped, and Daniel kissed his ear, his neck, kissing and then licking, sucking, gasping, almost biting, ravenous and half-wild to feel this again, the hot electric rush of lust, the beloved familiarity of skin and scent and taste, _I miss you, I love you, come home, Jack, Jack, Jack._

Jack moved his hands up to grip Daniel's head at the same time Daniel moved his hands down to cup Jack's ass, grind himself into Jack's hips. Jack pressed his face against Daniel's skull, and moaned, "I can _feel_ the words in there, Daniel."

_You don't really want to hear this_. It was right there, the reflexive, habitual answer.

Daniel opened the shutoff valve. It took muscle. It made him feel a little sick. "I miss you," he said. "I miss you so _fucking_ much." Like that, the sickness lifted, and he was flooded by blind arousal, desperate need, and the rest came out without thought, he couldn't have stopped it if he'd tried. "I miss you, I love you, come home, I can't stand this, please, god, Jack, fuck me, oil, counter, Jack, Jack, Jack ... " By _can't stand this_ Jack had found his mouth and was kissing and biting and licking through the words, and he pushed Daniel back against the counter and thrust, hard, with his hips and his tongue, and Daniel gave way, melting in submission and adoration and desire. Tongue thrusting under and around and over his, Jack strained past him to reach the bottle of oil and pull it close to hand, and dropped the other hand to work at Daniel's jeans.

"Open those," he said, suddenly, a hard slur against Daniel's mouth, and then he pushed off him and went down to his knees.

"Jack," Daniel said, a protest against knee abuse, his hands moving too slowly toward his jeans, and then, "Jack, you, I -- "

Jack had his fly open before Daniel's hands had reached it. He stripped jeans and briefs down to Daniel's shins with one hard tug. "I know where it's been," he said, catching Daniel's cock in his hand. He took it into his mouth and down his throat in one smooth motion, and as Daniel swore he pulled right off, and said, "Tastes like latex." He went back down, halfway, and came back off in a long suck. "Soon it won't anymore." Then he went to work, licking and lipping, engulfing and sucking, until Daniel's nails were gouging particleboard under the lip of the counter and Jack's name had turned into a blur of moans and he was harder than he'd been in weeks, wet and swollen.

"Don't make me come like this," he begged, forcing his mouth to make words. "Get up, Jack, ngh -- _unh_" -- the last a ragged grunt because Jack's bobbing head pulled off him just before he couldn't hold on anymore.

Jack came up fast, pushing strong and fluid off the leg with the new knee, and kissed Daniel's mouth hard. Then he stepped back and flipped Daniel around, quick and firm, and got him braced on the counter. He undid his belt and pants one-handed, unfastening between thrusts against Daniel's ass, the other hand swatting lightly at Daniel's dick, playing with the spring in it. Both hands disappeared as he fished a condom out of his pocket and pushed his pants down and tore open the packet and rolled the rubber on. He reached the bottle around, his mouth closing on the back of Daniel's neck, sucking and biting. There was a glug of oil poured in messy haste, a drip down the back of Daniel's leg. Then the bottle clunked back onto the counter and one hand closed over Daniel's cock while the other maneuvered Jack's dick between his cheeks, rubbing around to find the hole.

"You gonna be tight?" Jack said, thrusting just below the target. "No is an acceptable answer, just tell me."

"Yes," Daniel said. "No toys. Nobody else."

"Tell me the truth, not what I want to hear, or there's no point." Jack locked against the hole and held there with small pushes.

"Truth," Daniel said. "God, just push, just push in, it's OK ... "

Jack pushed, hard and steady, and Daniel spread around him and winced through the stretch and then groaned "God, _yes_, oh my god" as the inside of him welcomed Jack's cock and the burn in his asshole faded into the spreading pleasure of being filled, and then Jack was groin-deep in him and gripping his hips and thrusting slow and short, thick and slippery and changing up the angle to hit every hotspot inside and six months until the follow-up test and then he could have this bareback again if they both -- if he, if Jack -- except -- unless -- because -- until --

He clawed the countertop and started to come.

"Yeah," Jack said, a low growl from his chest. His strokes got longer, smoother. His hands controlled Daniel's hips, pulling them back onto each stroke. Daniel stopped bracing and let Jack have him; it was half voluntary and half the onset of orgasm melting the resistance in his knees and lower back. Jack surged into it, fiercely, _taking_ him -- taking charge of what belonged to him, exulting in it, knowing that it would make Daniel come, knowing that it was _how_ to make Daniel come, knowing that because it was his cock and his hands Daniel was already coming, knowing that taking possession of him would send Daniel into orbit and doing it on purpose, because he loved it and Daniel was his and because he knew how hard it made Daniel come.

As Daniel burst he felt the close, hard, jiggling thrusts Jack gave to push himself over, and then the peak of climax whited him out. When he came back Jack's arms were locked around his chest and belly and his own arms were dangling loose and he felt himself mumble-moaning something about light, and he knew he'd gone somewhere else, somewhere far or deep, somewhere he couldn't remember because that kind of orgasm was pure animal immediacy and it was already gone, flushed away by endorphins and oxytocin, the chemical echo of a memory that couldn't encode. He said, "I'm here, I'm here ... " Jack said, "Easy, OK, I know" into the skin behind his ear, and he managed to fumble-grope up to get his elbows on the counter. He couldn't hold the weight of his head or straighten his legs, so he let his face fall onto his arms and let Jack's hips and arms hold him up.

A contraction went through his ass, another surge like climax, a muscular instant replay. Jack grunted, feeling it; he was still very hard, he stayed hard like that when he was really turned on, as if the orgasm made barely a dent in it -- unless ...

"Did you come?" Daniel said, voice muffled by his arms.

"Yeah," Jack said. "Hard."

"Good," Daniel said. "Tight is good."

"Tight my ass," Jack said. "It's you, Daniel. Nothing else does this to me. Nothing and no one." He thrust, a deep, gentle suggestion of in-and-out, and Daniel spasmed again, groaning, and Jack did it again, rolling his hips, working the hard cock around inside. Daniel could feel the little spasms running through Jack's groin, feel the twitches in the balls squashed against him. They were still orgasmic, both of them. He moaned again, and felt Jack jiggle, push deep, jiggle, teasing the last of it out of them both. He draped over Daniel, weight resting on his back, mouth brushing Daniel's spine with breath and kisses. He wasn't even close to soft yet. Daniel contracted on him, and he groaned and pressed his face into Daniel's skin and reached around to cup his dangling package, hold it safe in his big, warm hand.

"Jack?" Daniel said, from his forearm muffle.

"Mm?"

"Is this when you feel like I'm not here? Right after?"

Jack tightened on him a little, hesitating. Then: "Sometimes."

"Now?"

"No."

"When?"

Another hesitation, and then, "When you don't go to sleep. When you lie next to me thinking."

Draped over his own arms with Jack draped over him, Daniel thought about that, trying and failing to capture the thoughts he'd be having if he weren't trying to tell Jack what they were, then trying instead to remember those times, reconstruct those thoughts. "I think about how I know it's going to end. How much I hate it when the sun comes up. How I won't see you that night. How long it'll be 'til the next time. Then I try to think about something else, so I won't be dwelling on that. By then you're usually snoring. I tuck up close and try to just soak in the feel of you, appreciate the time I have. I fall asleep trying to stay awake, trying to savor it." He shifted a little; the position was getting uncomfortable. Jack was almost soft now, and he pushed up straight, and Daniel palmed up off the counter. "I guess I do go away. I go off into the future where it's over. Maybe I withdraw in anticipation of it, so it's me controlling it, not the circumstances."

"I'll stay the weekend if you'll have me," Jack said quietly, stroking both hands down Daniel's back.

"I'd like that."

"But it won't be enough, will it. Your head will be in Monday morning. The cab'll be idling in there the whole time, waiting to take me to the airfield." He was massaging now, digging both thumbs in long furrows up the valley of Daniel's back, along his spine, through a residue of oil.

"I'll drive you," Daniel said softly.

Jack's hands curled at the nape of his neck and came back down with light fingernails. "Missing the point here."

"Yeah. I know."

"OK if I pull out?"

"Yeah." Daniel winced a little, knowing Jack couldn't see it. He hated the feel of a loaded condom coming out.

"I'm still here," Jack said, knowing withdrawal left Daniel empty. Knowing it better than Daniel had realized. Jack rolled around him to brace his tailbone against the counter, so he could look at him.

"I know," Daniel said, meeting the warm gaze. He managed something like a smile. "Me too."

Jack had one hand on his dick, fingers holding the rubber in place. The other hand came up to Daniel's face. The palm cupped his jaw. Daniel tried to hold the eye contact, because it looked like Jack was searching for something in his expression, but his eyes slid closed as he turned his cheek into the gentle, undemanding touch. The hand curved as he pressed into it. The thumb stroked his lips, his chin. It was sweet, so sweet. He sighed -- a deep, contented release of air.

"That's a good sigh, right?" Jack said.

This time the smile came naturally. "Yeah," Daniel said. He kissed down into Jack's palm, once and then again when it opened reflexively, then opened his eyes and nudged the hand away with nose and chin. Still smiling. "That thing's gonna be glued to you."

Jack grunted in the affirmative and retrieved his hand and looked down to peel the rubber off himself -- he always did it so delicately, his head dropping, intensely focused, and it was adorable in some way Daniel couldn't qualify, that painstaking care. When it was off, Daniel turned and tipped himself down, right hand on the counter for balance, and tugged the laces of Jack's shoes open so that he could toe them off and kick out of his pants instead of pulling them up. On his way back up, he dropped a soft kiss on Jack's penis.

"Latex," Jack said, making a face on his behalf, when he straightened.

"Yeah," he said, and took Jack's chin, and brushed lips over his. "Yucccch," he said, very softly, instead of _now we're even_, and brushed lips again.

Jack toed and pushed out of his shoes and pants while Daniel did the same, then glanced toward the kitchen garbage can, then regarded the dangly rubber in his hand. "Should flush this, in case they trash you."

"Yeah, 'cause identity thieves always carry DNA kits."

Jack looked up with a bright smile and said hopefully, "Got a shredder?"

"Cross-cut," Daniel said, and grabbed a paper towel to wipe the long drips off the cabinet doors. Jack anywhere near a shredder was nearly as bad as Jack anywhere near an electric stapler. "But really, no."

"Nah, guess not. Flush it? Gould the pipes if it sticks?"

Daniel still had the snake Jack had bought him after the third time something he dropped thoughtlessly down various pipes at his last place backed up the works past what a plunger could clear. "Yeah," he said, tossing the wadded paper towel. "Here, I'll do it, I have to go anyway." He took the thing, and felt suddenly weirdly bonded to Jack -- god, the stupidest, smallest things -- a wet wrinkly used condom -- and on impulse he pulled Jack in for a full kiss on the mouth. Not a lip brush; a hard kiss, with tongue.

It wasn't something he usually did. He could feel Jack's surprise through his mouth, the muscles of his neck. Then he felt the hairs prickle up on Jack's nape, against his palm. He heard and felt a low moan.

He deepened the kiss. He kissed Jack for a long time, slow and wet, a firm probing. When he finally drew back, he added the look on Jack's face to the arousal response and said, "I'm guessing I should do that more often."

"I'd like that," Jack said softly.

Daniel started for the bathroom, then said, "Do you want breakfast?"

"I ate on the plane," Jack said.

"Come to bed, then," Daniel said. "Turn the coffeemaker off."

Jack did, and came into the bathroom with him, dumping their piled clothes next to the hamper; pockets still had to be gone through. They soaped and rinsed off, then went in to bed. The morning sun was just angling into the room.

"Nobody else sleeps here," Daniel said, settling in close. "Or anything else."

"I didn't ask."

"You should know, though. If there's anything you want to ask, you should."

"There's a lot. Doesn't seem very important right now. Same goes for you, about the questions."

"I don't know if I want to know."

"If you're curious, you should ask."

Daniel was always curious. He'd been burning to know, every time Jack told him. But Jack would tell him when something might happen, and he'd say "Fine," and Jack would tell him when something had happened, and he'd say "OK," and he'd never ask. "I always figured you went by the maxim that a gentleman never tells."

"I'll tell you anything you want to know."

"I can't think of any of the questions now. The ones I had, when you told me."

After a second, Jack said, "I always wonder if you ... do any of them the way you do me. If it feels different. Nicer, softer, something."

"You don't do that?"

"No. Never did before you. Since I've been out there, nobody offered, and I didn't ask for it or try for it."

"Did you want to?"

"No. I really didn't. You?"

"I thought about it. I wanted to, but ... not if it wasn't you. Someone did ask me to and I said no."

"Did you ever? Before me?"

"No. And nobody had me that way before you, but I did tell you that at the start."

"Yeah." In the squeeze of Jack's arm was the memory of how relieved he'd been to hear that, and how guilty he felt for that possessiveness, for being glad he was the first one.

"You're still the only guy," Daniel said.

"So are you. That, you probably figured, though."

"No, actually." Daniel took a breath, and didn't preface his next with _To be honest_, because it applied to everything now, it had to, it was the only way out of the bad tangle they'd made of this over this years as the problems and resentments and silences and misunderstandings piled up. "I thought you'd tell me about the women but not the men if there were any. I suspected that in Washington it's actually easier than here -- safer, in its perverse way, because the stakes are higher, everybody's pretty high-ranking and they all have a long way to fall if they're caught. I figured there's a network. A structure in place for accommodating that kind of thing discreetly."

"There is," Jack said. "You guessed? Or you read up?"

"Guessed. Reading up or asking around -- well, I cared enough to wonder but I wasn't worried enough to do the work or take the risk. And I had no desire to find out without you knowing." Daniel drew back a little so he could settle his head level with Jack's and look at him. "Do you get reports about me?"

"Yes," Jack said quietly. A "yes" from him, as opposed to a nod or a "Yeah," signified. It was formal; it was Official Mode. "Through front channels and back channels. On all of you."

"Including surveillance data?"

"Yes. And yes, I read them. I put off the back-channel ones at first. I didn't want to read them. I almost put a stop to them, but I haven't yet. The advantages in terms of safety and security outweigh the invasion of privacy. They're two different priorities. Safety comes first."

"So you'd have known about anybody I dated and anything casual whether I told you or not."

"I'd have an aide black those sections out if I could, Daniel."

"I'm not taking issue with you reading them, I'm just trying to understand the picture."

"They always kept tabs on who we were with. Any romantic interest is a potential security breach."

"I know that. You know I know that. I've known it for years."

Jack nodded. Then a small smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. "What you don't know that I know is that you can hack the SGC records any time you like."

That was a genuine surprise. Even Sam didn't know that. Daniel blinked, processing it. Then he said, "Not strictly true. Up until I Ascended the first time, I could do that. While I was away, system security advanced past my skills, and I never had time to catch up. I couldn't get in today. Or anywhere near the Pentagon."

"That's too bad. I liked thinking you could find out anything you wanted to, about me. Evened the score, somehow."

"Which is so typical of how your head works. Do you keep a sexual score? If you get a report that I spent the night somewhere, do you go out and -- "

"No."

"OK." After a moment, Daniel said, "But you keep count."

"Tried not to. Couldn't really help it. Should be glad there aren't so many I lost count. But yeah. Always figuring you're very good at this now and there could be a lot of things surveillance doesn't pick up."

It was just a statement; there was no question in it, no nudge toward confirm or deny. But Daniel sensed something. He elbowed up. "What?" he said.

"Nothing," Jack said, with a _what are you talking about?_ face, frowning at the sudden shift.

"There's something. What is it? Ask me, Jack."

Comprehension flashed into Jack's eyes, and then they hardened. He hadn't been aware of the underlying question himself, but now he was.

He still wasn't going to answer. Daniel said, "I can't divine what it is if it's something I _haven't_ been doing, and there's nothing big I've held back, so really, you should ask me, because unless I'm really missing something here, the answer's no. Ask me, Jack. This is what we're doing now, we have to do it."

Jack's whole body had gone tense. He really didn't want to do this. He ground his teeth, then took a breath and visibly made himself relax. "Mitchell," he said quietly.

"Jesus." Daniel flopped onto his back. "No." Then he rolled onto his side again. "Crap, I just pushed you into breaking a really big rule, didn't I."

"Kinda did, yeah. Good answer, though."

Major General Jonathan J. O'Neill ass-fucking a male civilian adjunct in his kitchen was on them, the two of them, their rulebreaking and their responsibility. Asking what amounted to a direct question about another military officer was a very different transgression. And the truth was that although Daniel hadn't thought too hard about it, he had sensed a sort of ingenuous eagerness in Mitchell, a curiosity, as if Mitchell was drawn to him in ways he didn't understand himself, ways that intersected with and then extended beyond his attraction to the stars of the Stargate Program. If pushed to it, Daniel would have given him an off-the-cuff rating just slightly left of straight. Not enough for Mitchell to act on, or even be aware of in himself, but there. It didn't manifest with Teal'c, and there was no vibe between him and Sam; they really were the old friends and military buddies they seemed to be. But with Daniel, yeah, there was something.

"Fuck, Jack. I don't mean to go off into my head. I know I'm doing that. I just ... " He couldn't even say _there's nothing I can say about this that won't tell you what you're not supposed to know_.

"Too late," Jack said. "I get that there's something. I made the same assessment. It's OK. You're not outting him."

"It's minuscule. Negligible. I'd bet a year's pay that he's not even aware of it. It's very innocent. He's got a crush on all of us, we know it and you know it. Unfathomably to me, it's one of the reasons you picked him, and I hope you knew what you were doing. There's a little extra zing in the quality of his crush on me particularly, and it's not there with Teal'c, so it's more personal than sexual, but it's not something that anyone should ever point out to him. He's happily ignorant of it. I never even thought much about it before now, because" _to be honest_ "I wasn't interested. If I were, I wouldn't act on it, but what's important is that I'm really not." He put a hand on Jack's chest. "It was you, Jack, not you-as-team-leader. I didn't fall in love with my bodyguard." He ventured a smile. "Or my tormentor."

Jack smiled back and rubbed Daniel's hand. "I admit I wondered about that."

"No more wondering? Put that one to bed?"

"Yeah. Listen, though -- there's some stuff I need to ask you in a professional capacity, not relationship-based. Stuff touching on this. Should I save that for later?"

"Is it what you came here to talk about?"

"It's a big part of it, yeah."

"Are you even here? Tabs-wise? Nix that, stupid question."

"I'm in town for a series of meetings at Peterson on Monday. I popped in on my old teammate for a surprise visit. My gear's at the Marriott, not the Q. Later I'll pick it up because you insisted on putting me up here. The surveillance crews hate this place, and they'd love to hear what I have to talk to you about, but that's their problem. No appearance of impropriety."

After the original incident with Orlin, Sam had gotten angry and suspicious about the potential of surveillance, and when the NID started noticeably sniffing around, she'd talked to Jack about stealthing all of their residences. They'd done all three -- quite effectively, between Jack's training in surveillance technology and Sam's ability to develop countermeasures. They'd done Lee's place, too, a sort of community effort, reward for him helping Sam with R&amp;D, and then he'd helped other staffers do it. Countersurveillance had become a sort of SGC virus. Nobody could order them to stop because nobody could officially admit that they were surveilled. Their only failure had been with Teal'c's place last year; Hammond had told Jack, off the record, that Teal'c's permission to live off-base was contingent upon nobody stealthing his apartment, and that if they did stealth it, an excuse would be manufactured to revoke the permission. None of them had forgotten the irony of what had happened because they'd been forbidden from securing the premises. But when Daniel had dumped the house and taken this place, after the thing with Osiris, they'd gone ahead and installed the jammers and slathered on opaque-to-surveillance paint and set up the Carter &amp; Lee Specials. Jack could be observed and photographed entering the building, even entering Daniel's apartment, but nothing that happened inside the apartment could be seen, heard, or recorded.

"Well, tell me what it concerns generally," Daniel said. "I've got you naked in my bed, I don't really want to talk shop, but I'm curious now."

"Generally it concerns Mitchell's conduct. I'm concerned that I made a serious tactical error in giving him command of SG-1. I'm considering my options and I don't trust the data I have to work with. Carter won't rat him out even if she has serious concerns of her own. So I'm going to ask you."

"Oh boy."

"Yeah."

Daniel laughed in wry amazement at the whole situation. "And in spyspeak, milspeak, I've already admitted to operational concerns by not saying something like 'I thought we just covered the conduct question.' Because clearly we're not talking about sexual conduct here."

"True. But acknowledging that there are issues, that's pro forma. Obviously there are issues. What I need and don't have is a sense of how it plays out firsthand. I know how differently actions read on a report from how they go down in the field." Jack sighed. "It's telling on him, big time. Or, maybe, an opportunity to defend him in ways that most officers aren't lucky enough to be defended."

"And wouldn't he be thrilled to know we were deciding the fate of his career while lying in bed between fucks."

"We're not deciding his fate now. We're deciding if we should decide it now or later, assuming you're willing to help me out."

"You know, your job sucks more than I realized."

"No kidding."

"Let's talk about that later, OK?" _To be honest,_ "I do have concerns. I approached Mitchell with them directly, and ... some things changed, some didn't. Since then I've vacillated about whether to raise the issue with Landry or try to keep it within the team."

"Which is why it's such a pain in the ass that you're not military."

"Yeah, I cry myself to sleep every night because I can't rely on military protocol to make my decisions for me."

"Next time count your blessings. Bringing this to Landry would only stall it. But ... later, right?"

"Yeah," Daniel said, and closed his eyes. "No sleep aids required this time."

He fell asleep with Jack's hand on his hair, limbs a comfortable tangle, thinking how easy this was, how stupid it was all the times he fought to stay awake, thinking about what Jack had said about him lying there pulled into his own thoughts, thinking about how he wasn't doing that now except that thinking about how he wasn't doing it _was_ doing it, thinking he should say something, offer Jack something verbal, tell him how for the past ten years he'd never slept well unless Jack was nearby, except that might come off as a complaint or some kind of neediness instead of the intended compliment, thinking if he fell asleep too fast right now it would make a statement about how badly he'd slept last night or how little he'd slept last night and why, and maybe a sleep aid was required, because Jack's hand cupped his head in close and Jack's low voice said, "I'm here. Let go." And then he did.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

He woke up into a drenching of late-morning sunshine. He was still on his side, and Jack had rolled up onto his side to face him, and his knuckles were moving in a slow caress down the front of Daniel's body. Daniel smiled sleepily into Jack's eyes and said, "Nowhere near getting it up yet."

"Erections aren't everything," Jack said, stroking up under the inner thigh of Daniel's upper leg, encouraging him to lift it, open himself.

A thrill of gooseflesh ran up Daniel's body as Jack started playing with him soft. The exploration of fingertips, warm full-hand tugs and petting, the light stroke of a single finger; when Jack's other hand gently lifted his limp penis so that he could caress his scrotum with all five fingers, Daniel let out a moany sigh of pleasure and let his eyes slide closed again and turned his hips to expose himself more fully. He loved this. He _loved_ this. It was the sweetest form of lovemaking, this gentle touching; it induced the sweetest of all possible kinds of sexual arousal, where the primary arousal response was absent and all the secondary responses could be appreciated for themselves. The soft tingling of his skin, all over, the turn-on of being played with, handled, lifted him out of the heavy blanket of sleep on a buoyant fizz of pleasure. He floated in sunshine, on the sea of warm sheets, drifting in the currents of Jack's touch.

After a while, he got his eyes to open and focus on Jack's. They were fixed on his face, soft and loving. "Am I doing it again?" he asked, almost in a whisper.

"Nope," Jack said, no hitch in the movements of his fingers between Daniel's legs. "I know you're here. You're just blissed out. It's beautiful. I like to watch it."

"I love you. I love this."

"Me too." Jack kissed him softly on the lips. "You want my mouth?"

"Then you can't watch me."

Jack smiled, with a tiny shake of his head. "Man, it just doesn't stop." He elbowed up a little, and said with deliberate clarity, "I want to lick you." A feather-light touch of his forefinger on Daniel's glans. "Here." A touch on his left testicle. "Here." A touch up behind his balls. "Here. That's what I want to do. Do you want me to?"

"Yes," he whispered, understanding. They kept phrasing the questions wrong, trying to anticipate each other. Raising objections by trying to preemptively defuse them. Too twisted, too complicated. This was better. This was good. "Yes," he said again, and rolled full onto his back as Jack moved down. Together they spread and raised his legs. He dragged the other pillow under his head to prop it up so that he could watch what Jack was doing. Jack stretched himself along the bottom half of the bed, legs overhanging, elbows pulled in between Daniel's legs and bracing his own upper body. He touched more, before he licked; he stroked, and looked, drinking in the view, arranging the package different ways.

Daniel's arousal swelled. Jack played with everything; fiddling was one of his primary means of interaction with his environment. Daniel's was looking; his process was visual. To watch Jack play with his penis and his testicles, not because they were hard but because they were fascinating and beautiful and he just liked to touch them ... it did things to Daniel deep in his body, down deep in his libido; it got him deeply hot in ways that he couldn't savor when he was hard and straining to come.

Jack lifted Daniel's balls, pressed them up and out of the way, and stroked with his tongue just behind them. His eyes slid closed, long soft lashes on his cheeks; he breathed in, deeply, and then moaned the breath out, and fed one of Daniel's balls into his mouth.

"Oh, _god_," Daniel whispered. His vision blurred but he kept his eyes open; his vision was already blurry, he'd laid his glasses aside when he came to bed, but pleasure relaxed their focus even more. Because he was soft and loose, Jack could separate out one testicle and take it completely into his mouth. He sucked it tenderly, moaning softly. He'd never seemed that oral to Daniel, he was a ravenous kisser but Daniel had always thought of himself as the oral one, and now it seemed this was something he hadn't known about Jack in all these years. How much pleasure he took in this. Daniel lost a breath, and felt his belly contract, his ass. "God, Jack, god, I'm _so turned on_," he said, and then he just moaned again, because it was almost more than he could stand, how good this was.

Jack's thumb stroked acknowledgment into the crease of his groin, then moved under to support his balls, with the other, as he drew gently, wetly off. "Can you reach your glasses?"

"I think so," Daniel said vaguely, watching and feeling Jack breathe on him.

"Put 'em on," Jack said. "I like knowing you're watching."

Daniel fumbled them a little but got them on. Jack's eyes came into focus with a soft shock, looking straight up at him as Jack nibbled, slow and soft. Glans, and shaft, then glans again; his lips held it still while his tongue traced delicately around the opening. Jack's gaze lost focus and he moaned again and lipped the whole penis into his mouth, tonguing it deeper, elbowing up to take more of it, all the way down, pressing his nose into pubic hair and inhaling deeply. He sucked the heavy softness with infinite tenderness. Breathing, and sucking; gentle movements of his tongue. His thumbs lightly stroked the skin of Daniel's inner thighs, raising tiny hairs to a prickling pleasure.

He stayed that way for a long time. His fingers roamed, and played, and roamed more widely, stroking nipples, belly, scratching down through coarse hair. When he finally slid his mouth off, he lifted Daniel's penis with his fingers and captured his balls with the other hand, opening them so that he could lick into the place where they connected, stretch the skin there gently and tease it with his lips.

Daniel was wholly, breathlessly orgasmic by then. Physiologically incapable of orgasm as he understood it, but incontrovertibly feeling every feeling that accompanied its onset. His ass felt swollen, throbbing; his skin was flushed, his pulse was racing, his breath was short. "Put a finger in me?" he said, his voice coming out shaky, creaky.

"Lube," Jack said, into the underside of his penis, voiced bilabial stop pressing into his skin.

Daniel groped it from the drawer without dropping it and handed it down.

Jack freed one hand to take it, but kept his mouth there, stroking, kissing. "Roll your lower back," he murmured.

Daniel drew his legs up farther -- it did something to the presentation of his package that made Jack say, "Oh, yeah" -- and rolled his hips to give better access to the back of him. Jack thumbed gel up over the hole and rubbed in light circles. Microcontractions fluttered through it, and Jack stroked a smile along the length of his penis and said, "God, that is so hot."

When he pressed the tip of his forefinger in, Daniel felt the first flush of heat through his groin. He'd never been so focused on his own arousal; hardening had always superseded everything else. Now he could feel the nerves sing, he could feel the increase of blood flow. He was hyperaware, hypersensitized. Jack's finger wormed a little deeper, then started to withdraw, to worm back in again.

"Stay in," Daniel said. "Stroke."

Jack kissed his penis and looked up at him. His pupils were dilated; the artery in his neck visibly throbbed. "I think you're gonna come, here, somehow. Are you?"

"I think so. I don't know. It's not important. It feels so good ... "

Jack's gaze was locked on his. He slid his whole finger in and circled the gland with the pad of it. His touch was unerring; he knew exactly where it was. He knew every inch of Daniel's body, every nook and cranny; he stroked around the prostate without pressing right on it. Daniel's eyes tried to close, his head wanted to fall back, but he held Jack's gaze, and blood heated his face.

He converted it into words. "I never look at you when I come. I never keep my eyes open."

"Don't think you can," Jack said, gently, swirling his chin over Daniel's glans, swirling his fingertip around Daniel's prostate. "'S like sneezing."

The hint of beard on Jack's chin was an exquisite fine-sandpaper stimulation. "Jack, I think I'm ... I ... oh, god." He kept his eyes open but everything frizzed when the pad of Jack's finger circled in to the target. His hips started to shake with tiny bucks; every sweep over the gland sent an electric jolt up his body and down his legs. His penis twitched; it was maybe half-hard, from the feel of it, but it disappeared into Jack's mouth and the state of his erection had just completely ceased to matter.

He _was_ going to come. The feeling wasn't anything like what he was used to, cock tightening and balls squeezing until everything surged into a gush of fluid. The feeling was everywhere, radiating out from the pleasure up inside him; he perceived it in his groin, his belly, his thighs, his ass, his nipples, his pounding heart; everything that ordinarily centered in his balls and the tip of his penis was spread through him in a hot swell. He felt it in his _fingertips_. "It's good," he slurred, trying not to slide away into his head, "so good ... "

He lost track of time. He stayed buoyed on the crest, the about-to-come surge, he kept on being about to come and about to come. He didn't know how long it lasted; long enough for him to think about how long it was. He moaned, trying to stop thinking, trying to say _I'm here, I'm here_, but it was too good and too sweet and he couldn't push words out. His _lips_ were tingling.

The room seemed abruptly, surreally bright. He thought his eyes had closed but he could still see the walls, soaked in white sunlight, decorations lost in the glare; his pupils must be hyperdilated. He wondered vaguely if he was passing out, but in his experience unconsciousness came in a rushing black sparkle, a closing-in, not this white expansion. He could feel his skin dissolving into the whiteness, mercuric ecstasy shooting up his spine and down every limb, and in the moment he felt himself detach from it, come loose, he recognized this feeling, he knew what this was, and he

heard his own voice repeating Jack's name, from right beside him, and then he was saying it, "Jack, Jack, Jack," and he was saying it into Jack's mouth because Jack's body was covering his, Jack's hand was cradling his head as he ripped the spare pillow out from under and carefully lowered Daniel into the one under it, Jack was on him and around him and pressed soft and cool between his legs, and he was coming, still coming, but he was soft and it was all collapsing inward, all of him melting around the sharp echo of an orgasm he hadn't felt because it had knocked him outside of himself. Only Jack's weight and Jack's will were holding him together, holding him down on the bed.

"Jack ... "

"Shhhhh," Jack said, into his cheeks, his eyelids. "Shhhh, I've got you."

"Jack, I didn't, I didn't, I just, I, Jack -- "

"It's OK, you're back, it'll be OK now," into his eyebrow, his temple, his ear.

"Jack ... Jack."

"Yeah. Better. OK. OK." Jack nuzzled his ear, elbowed and kneed a little of the weight off him.

"What _was_ that?" he said, in a drunken slur.

"Motherfucker of an orgasm is what it was," Jack said. "Dry ejaculation. You never really got hard. Something just happened that I didn't think the male body was capable of. Incidentally also scared the crap out of me, but you're OK."

He became aware that Jack's heart was thundering and his breath sounded short. He'd been scared. Really scared; full adrenaline response. Nothing incidental about it. "Didn't mean to ... scare you ... "

"It's OK. It was only at the end. Thought I fucked up, pushed too hard. Overstimulation. I just ... I really thought ... It's OK. Never mind."

"What _happened_?"

"You made this sound, and then ... "

"And then _what_?"

"You weren't breathing."

"I ... ?"

"You stopped breathing and I think your heart stopped. I was reaching to feel for a pulse when it started again, so it wasn't very long. A few seconds." He huffed out another breath, harsh. "Long enough."

"Jack -- "

"I'm into it metaphorically, OK, I'm a lot more romantic than I like to admit, but the literal thing, not so much." He was shaking now. Adrenaline crash. Close to babbling, by O'Neill standards. "I really fucking hate it when you die. Killing you with sex would be unconscionably stupid."

"I wasn't -- it didn't -- it was just really good, that's -- "

"I worked you up too much. I didn't know that was _possible_, jesus, who the hell knew, but I should have -- "

"It's not your _fault_ \-- "

Jack pushed up on his arms. His hard stare glittered, somewhere between shock and savagery. "_Everything_ that scares the shit out of me is my fault. You on the wrong side of a balcony railing because I didn't pay attention to the signs, that's my fault. You jumping through a window into a hot reactor room because I was off gladhanding assholes, that's my fault. You beamed onto a replicator ship because I fucked Fifth over and then I authorized Carter to fuck with that machine he made and _then_ I said sure guys go be _observers_ on _an op I didn't plan_ \-- you in a jail cell on that stinking armpit of the galaxy because I let somebody talk me into thinking that _chipping_ you would keep you _safe_ \-- It's all my fault, all of it. You belong to me, goddammit. You're mine. I should take better fucking care of you." He dropped down, face in the pillow. "Sorry. Rewind. Forget all that."

Daniel stroked down his sides, trying for warm and soothing, pressing so that Jack wouldn't feel the shaking in his own hands. "In crapscaredoutofyou-o veritas," he said softly.

"I'm full of shit. Some of it gets scared out of me, it gets all over. Ignore it."

"We're not doing that anymore."

"Fine. _Fine_: I'm scared to death I'll lose you again. I don't want you going out there anymore. I'm afraid I put that fucking hothead in charge so he'd take the bullet instead of you. I found somebody more reckless and inexperienced than you ever were on your greenest day and I gave him that team so there'd be somebody guaranteed to buy it instead of you. Firing squad's too good for me at this point."

He went still, as if he was as shocked as Daniel to hear what had come out of his mouth. The stunned silence stretched for a long time. Then Daniel said, "You didn't know I'd be on the team."

"I knew _something_ would fuck up your plans!" Jack said into the pillow, an angry groan. "When I stopped holding you back I could feel it. You weren't gonna get to Pegasus. I was sure of it. I _knew_. I just didn't know what. The only thing I could think was that something worse than hijacking was gonna happen to the ship en route. I almost scrubbed the flight. My judgment is fucked up beyond all possible repair, but my ESP's still working fine."

"Christ, Jack. The Goa'uld have nothing on you. Talk about a god complex."

"Tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood."

"Kirk was Navy. Get off me, would you? I need to look at you."

Jack rolled off him but wouldn't let go. Daniel managed to get a pillow under his head, get his arm positioned so the circulation wasn't cut off by Jack's ribs. "There's so much more going on here than I ever knew."

"My issues. I said forget it."

"_Mi casa es su casa_," Daniel said gently. "_Mis_ issues _son tus_ issues, _y los tuyos son los míos_."

"'Issues' _debe ser feminina_."

"Sexist pig."

"Dammit, now I can't eat that eight-year-old bacon in your freezer."

"You didn't scare yourself out of having sex with me ever again, did you?"

"I did for the next couple of hours, yeah."

"How about me having sex with you?"

"That we can negotiate. Give me a second here, willya? I'm really wiped now. And I feel like a jackass. And we've gotta eat at some point."

They lay there in Daniel's bed, unmoving except for breath and pulse, not saying anything after the post-scare coping banter ran out, Daniel getting a pass on vocalizing his thoughts because Jack had asked for a time-out. The sun moved above the frame of the window, and the room, though still bright, felt colder, shadowed. Jack pulled the covers over Daniel before he shivered, then over both of them when Daniel moved to half-cover Jack's body with his. Their breathing synched up. Against his forehead, Daniel felt Jack wince, at some thought he was keeping to himself. Maybe a replay of what had just happened. He didn't know if Jack's brain looped the way his did.

"Shower," Daniel said. "Warm shower. Sandwich. Beer."

"Yeah," Jack said. "OK."

They showered together, hanging on each other, and dried each other off quietly, taking their time. Jack put on a pair of Daniel's sweats and a UCLA T-shirt that Daniel never wore but wouldn't get rid of; Sam had mail-ordered it for him a couple of years ago, part of a set of paraphernalia from every school he'd attended, not understanding that he didn't care how many items like that he'd lost over the years. He'd only ever bought school shirts when he was too busy to do laundry and that's all the U-store had, he didn't get attached to things like that and if he did, having brand-new replacements would only make the lack of beat-up old stuff from his actual years at those places hurt more. Just as well it got some use, he thought; but it was strange to see it on Jack, wrong in some strange way.

Wordlessly, they made sandwiches, standing shoulder to shoulder at the counter, close enough to bang elbows over the mustard and mayonnaise, close enough to press in without leaning. They ate at the corner of the dining table, looking out the window at the cloud-scudded sky, the commercial buildings across the street, the Rockies in the distance. Daniel liked an apartment with a view -- he spent too much time underground -- but this one conspicuously lacked a terrace. The beers went down fast because it was hard to swallow the food. When the plates and bottles were empty, they didn't get up right away to bring them into the kitchen.

"It was like ascension," Daniel said. "This kind of ... floaty whiteness, and then ... nothing, no memory when I came back. It happened in the kitchen, too, a little bit. Before."

"That's something new?"

"Yeah."

Jack swirled a crumb around his plate with a fingertip. "What's it mean, you think?"

"I don't know." Daniel shook his head. Looked out at the clouds.

"I almost passed out once, one time I came really hard," Jack said. Quietly, conversationally. "I felt my own heart stop. I felt like I was falling. Not down, though. Falling forward. You know that when people get shot, they fall forward, whether you shoot 'em in the front or the back?"

"Can't say I knew that."

"I literally felt my heart stop, and I knew my body was still kneeling up straight, but I felt whatever's _in_ my body falling forward into this black wall. If I fell _through_ the wall, I'd punch out into something, some place on the other side, and half of me kinda wanted to just go ahead and do that. Find out what was there. And some little -- thing inside me, some cliched kind of little voice, said, No. Not yet. And I pulled myself back. And then I was back."

Daniel tried not to show how surprised he was to hear Jack describe an experience like that out loud. "So, that happens sometimes. _L'orgasme ne s'appelle pas 'la petite mort' pour rien._"

"It was the first time I fucked you. The time that happened."

Daniel turned his plate, slowly, on the table, to make the pattern in the glaze line up with the grain of the tabletop. "OK."

"I'm not sayin' that means anything. I'm just sayin'."

"No," Daniel said, as slowly as he kept turning the plate, "you're saying something, I'm just not sure how to engage with it. Do you think we're too much for each other? That the fidelity issues and separation issues and occupational issues are really sidebars, and we should end this before we fuck each other to death or scare each other to death?"

"I have to let you go," Jack said, "and I can't let go."

"Who _says_?"

Jack didn't answer. He looked like he wanted to, was trying to, and couldn't. Then he looked straight up at Daniel and said, "You're worth any sacrifice, do you know that? Any sacrifice, and the one that might do some good, I don't have the balls to make."

Daniel smiled sadly. "From anyone else, maybe. Anyone but you. That's how the universe works. That's why cruel, capricious gods are such a popular metaphor for its mechanisms."

"You never did recover from me taking that damn job, did you."

"Not really, no."

"Or from me taking command of the SGC?"

"Nope. It's not a thing, OK? I've never forgiven myself for bailing on you when I ascended the first time, either, and I know you never recovered from that, and to be" -- _whoops_ \-- "honest, I've never really gotten over the fact that I stayed on Abydos and you left me there, even though we both had good reasons for what we did. Lives go different ways. You do the best you can at the time. It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that you don't trust me not to go haring off after the next Heliopolis or higher state of being."

"Suppose I went haring off with you. Then we'd be square?"

"We blew past square years ago. Dodecahedral, maybe."

"Answer the question."

"Are you equating your promotions with ascension?"

"Lotta parallels, don't you think? The two big things that have separated us. Since there's been an us, anyway."

"I don't keep scorecards the way you do, and Abydos was a pretty big thing and it doesn't fit. But I'll grant the analogy. I'll be happy if you get out of Washington; I think it's bad for you. But that doesn't mean you'd ... come home. To me. And I'll still belong to you, even if I'm off exploring somewhere and you're ... wherever your path takes you. We'll always be an us, Jack, whatever happens. Just not that kind of us."

"It's so good to know that romance isn't dead."

"If this were a romance we'd have run off together a long time ago."

Jack was silent again. Nothing had changed, nothing would ever change. Jack still had things to do that he could only get done if he kept working the system. He probably always would. At sixty they'd make him retire and then pull him back in as a consultant the same way they did Hammond. For Daniel it was the same-old-song hopelessness, the same longing and despair and anger. Year after year after year after year he went through this. And Monday morning a car would come to take Jack to Peterson, and it would all just go on.

"I'm in the future in my head again," he said. Not because it mattered, particularly; just to say it. Announcement. Status report. Full disclosure.

"Give the driver twenty bucks for his trouble and send the damn cab away."

"It's not a cab. It's a company car. That's what always comes for you. A military escort. It's symbolic. It's why you always go."

"You said you'd drive me."

"I always say that, and it never works out that way. That sounds sulky. Sorry."

Jack took a breath, let it out, was silent; then took another, deeper breath, let half of it out, and said, "There are times I've thought we shouldn't see each other at all until I have my separation papers in my hands. To, you know, offer you."

_The way you offered them to Sara? A day late and a life short?_

No matter what Jack said or what Jack wanted, some thoughts should never be expressed.

"Would that be easier on you?" he asked instead.

"No easier, no harder. It's hard either way. Sucks either way. It'd be easier for you, though."

"No," Daniel said. "You'd think it would be, but it wouldn't. I don't mean 'one would think' -- I mean it would be typical of you to believe you were doing me a ... favor, a kindness, if you did that. You wouldn't be."

Jack fanned his fingertips up the sides of his empty bottle, frowning into the green glass, then looked up and said, "Tell me the truth about what you expect, long-term."

Daniel shrugged. "In the event that we stop the Ori, I expect that I will find or make a place to continue my work where I'm not under the control of any Earth government or military organization. I expect to spend the rest of my life hoping against hope that you'll walk through the nearest gate, free and clear of obligation or duty to anyone but yourself. I expect to be disappointed."

"So you try not to hope?"

"I never stop hoping, Jack. And I expect never to get what I hope for. In some universe out there I go to sleep with you every night and wake up with you every morning and trust that it's going to be like that for as long as we live. No cabs. No Mondays. But that isn't this one. I could fix this by coming East to live with you. I could have said yes to that IOA liaison job. I didn't. I want to keep going through the gate. Even if it terrifies you. Even if it keeps us apart. Even if it sticks us with Woolsey."

"Woolsey's all right."

"Not so much from where I'm standing. But that's kind of my point. You say you took that job to get away from you-and-me, and I believe you and I accept my part in that, but I also believe that you know that you are the only person who will do right by the SGC in that position. It has to be you; after Hammond, there's simply no one else, and _he_ needs to be exactly where _he_ is, in whispering distance of this president's ear. You did what you always do, when you took a job you knew would be a slow death for you: you put duty first. _I didn't_. You can say whatever you want about how it has to be me and Sam and Teal'c out there, Earth's last best hope against the incursion du jour, but it's just not true. If they won't give her command of the place or leave her in peace at Area 51, then at the least Sam should be heading up the first-response science divisions at the SGC, not roaming around in a field unit. Teal'c should be doing his duty by the Jaffa. And I should be handling the IOA and sitting at my desk where people can find me and show me stuff and ask me questions. You are the only one of us who went where he was needed instead of where he wanted to go. You're still in command and riding shotgun. I'm still running off after what interests me. It's always been that way and it always will."

He paused, left room for Jack to interject, waited for Jack to say all the things he was sure that Jack would say, and then went on, because Jack didn't say anything, and he'd agreed not to assume the answers without asking the questions.

"I know you know about the Foundation," he said.

Jack shrugged. He was still staring out the window. "An organization with the clout and financial resources of MacArthur only with Catherine's and Ernest's names on it? You could say I've been taking an interest, yes."

"So you've extrapolated its purpose."

"To get you your colony. Your own SGC. Seed money, free and clear, to start a self-sustaining facility beyond the control of the entities that control the SGC. Biggest grant application of your career, but you needed someplace to apply _to_, and Catherine started it for you. Yeah, I pretty much figured that."

"It's about a lot more than that -- it's about offworld exploration in general, and it was Catherine's idea, Catherine's dream, not mine -- but yeah, OK. And I pretty much figure that you and Hayes and Hammond are planning on taking the Stargate Program public before the end of his term, whether the IOA is on board or not. And that's mostly what you came here to talk to me about. Before I get killed offworld and it's too late to get my input. Or before I go back to Washington and open my big mouth and fuck it up for you."

"Not mostly," Jack said. "Partly. Mostly I'm here to hand your team your asses for the Tegalus disaster. My personal investment there has severely compromised my judgment, and as proof of that I decided that I had to see you first -- which is why I didn't call, because there was a high likelihood you'd piss me off on the phone and I'd change my mind for the wrong reasons about a decision I made on dubious grounds in the first place."

Daniel saw muscle and tendons cord in Jack's forearms and wrists, sensed the infinitesimal shift of weight, and he said, "Don't."

"You don't kn-- "

"Yes I do. Don't get up and leave. You're going to go and spend the next year, five years, seven years doing whatever you have to do to make it possible for us to live and work together. You'll quadruple your efforts to meet your professional goals, you'll make an all-out assault on don't ask don't tell, you'll turn the world on its head, the galaxy, whatever it takes. You won't sleep with anyone else but you won't ask me not to. You'll drive yourself into the ground working toward that moment when you can come back and offer yourself to me, no strings or constraints or conditions. You won't come back 'til you've fixed it. All of it."

Jack didn't lift his stare from the table. "You think I won't?"

"Fix it all? Of course you will, eventually. But if putting this on hold is the right decision, then we'll make it together. If you walk out on me for my own good, don't expect me to be around when you come waltzing back on retirement day."

The flicker in Jack's raised eyes said that he'd been strongly considering doing exactly that, and that the flat force of Daniel's response had surprised him. Daniel didn't hand out ultimatums very often.

Wearily, trying to gentle it down, Daniel said, "I've spent enough time without you. I'd rather have what I can get. It's just a long-distance relationship, Jack. Military couples make those work all the time."

"When there's an end in sight. Nothing I say, nothing I promise, will make a dent in your conviction that this is how it will always be."

"It's better than it was this morning," Daniel offered. He got up and picked up his plate and empty beer bottle and waited for Jack to accept the message and do the same. "I have an idea about Mitchell, by the way, if you want to hear it."

"I don't give a flying fuck about Mitchell right now," Jack said, going with him into the kitchen.

"Yeah me neither. So here's the idea: You talk to him. Before I render any opinion on his performance, before we've technically really conspired behind his back, before the end of the weekend."

"And say _what_?" Jack asked irritably, wiping mayo and mustard off the plates while Daniel rinsed the bottles, then switching places with him to wash the plates while Daniel put the bottles in the recycling bin. "That I set him up to be human Kevlar? That with him in the mix that team has made more disastrously bad decisions in seven months than we made in seven years?"

"Tell him you have concerns and tell him why. Ask him to justify his actions -- let him defend himself, off the record, with you, one officer to another. If you think he needs to shape up, tell him what he needs to do. What you think he needs to do -- not what I think, or what you think Sam thinks, or what Teal'c thinks if you've already asked him and didn't tell me, whatever. Stop pulling on him professionally the crap I've been pulling on you personally."

"If you don't want to inform on a teammate, Daniel, just say no. There are a lot more entertaining ways to distract me from the heavy personal shit we've been dealing with."

"I _don't_ want to inform on my teammate. I will, because it's you asking, but my way's a much better way. You've been playing these Machiavellian head games since you took that job, and that kind of manipulation -- well, maybe your master plan is beyond my ken, but I don't think it's your forte, Jack. There are a lot more entertaining ways to amuse yourself than withholding relevant information from people like Landry and Mitchell and then waiting to hear about how they squirmed." He got another beer out of the fridge and turned to offer it to Jack. "What? You wanted to talk about this sometime, right?"

Jack growled out of his arms-folded slouch against the sink to take the beer. "I'm thinkin' later wasn't later enough." He flicked his thumbnail against the cap a few times, but didn't reach for the opener to pop it. "I've gotta get my gear from the hotel," he said abruptly, and put the beer down.

"Send somebody over with it."

"Unnecessary red flag, and I need the air."

"You don't need the air, and you don't need your gear. You have stuff here."

"Daniel -- "

"Maybe what you need is to stop running away."

There was only so far you could push Jack before he came back at you, snarling and sardonic if you were lucky, cold and deadly if you weren't. "Says the guy who can't keep his eyes open?" Jack said, mouth twisting. "Says the guy who runs halfway to another plane of existence instead of _sharing the fucking orgasm_ with me? Says the guy who doesn't come, he _goes_?"

"Takes one to know one," Daniel said, but he couldn't stop there, he knew he should stop now but he couldn't, and he said, "You told John Sheppard that anybody who didn't want to go through the stargate was wacked _and you let them bend you over a desk_. Why _do_ you do women, Jack? You say you don't get much out of it, so why? You think maybe it's so you can pretend that _sex_ is how you cheat on me? The military's been taking you up the ass for two years. There's no fucking room left in there for me."

"You were an assignment. It ended. That's how it goes."

"Then make me a _choice_!"

"_How?_"

"_I don't know!_ But when did that ever stop us before? When did we stop _finding a way_, Jack?"

"A way to _what_? Live happily ever after?"

"A way to live _at all_. God, Jack -- this isn't life. We're the only ones who ever knew about this and it's so under-the-radar it doesn't even exist _for us_. It's so low-key you can't even hear it. It's _subsonic_."

"I doubt your neighbors think so."

"They can't hear our domestic spats. We could hurl crockery and they wouldn't hear a thing. That's how well this place is stealthed. _Just like the relationship_."

Jack turned and put his hands on the sink, giving himself something to push against. "We should have ended when the job ended. When the team broke up."

"But we didn't. We couldn't end it. We can't end it. So there has to be another way." He looked at Jack pushing against the sink and said, "There has to be a better way than fucking around to make it hurt so we'll know it still exists."

"Always with the better way." Jack pushed off and turned. "Give me some options. Give me something to fight besides the unending crappiness of this situation. That's what you wanted to do on Tegalus, right? Unify those countries against the Ori? But they wouldn't listen. So I'm listening. I hear you about Mitchell. I'll have a talk with him. But for this, for us -- you gotta give me more to work with than 'there has to be a better way.'"

_Then you have to give me a chance,_ Daniel shot back in his mind. _Give me more time before you push the button on the goddamn detonator._ But he'd had time. He'd had years. He never engaged with it enough to come up with a solution. He tried _not_ to think about it. He ran away, into his head, into strangers' beds, into whatever distractions he found through the gate. He'd saved the Enkarans and the Gadmeer _because Jack was going to push the button_.

Daniel looked at him for a long time, at the ravages that Washington had wrought upon him, the pale skin, the strained eyes. Jack was such a familiar extension of himself that even in time-lapse glimpses he'd barely noticed the decline. He wondered how it manifested in him. What Jack saw if there was ever a moment when Jack glimpsed what this new war was turning him into. A war no different from the one he'd tried to dive into on Atlantis. Just another war with another race of lifesucking powermongers trying to herd them for use as hosts, as labor, as fodder. Another war to blame it all on, while over and over again he escaped into the future in his head, trying to outrun the heartbreak he believed that even the happiest present would inexorably lead to. And this was it, right now: the future that had lain in store for him, year after year when he did nothing to fix the present.

There had to be a better way. There had to be a better use for the future than that.

He pushed off the cold stove and went out through the living room into the den. Grabbed an old brown expanding file, came out to find Jack standing in the living room, having followed him halfway, maybe thinking he'd walked out and this was it, the silent end of the line, the heat death of their universe, the point where they admitted that the options had run out. He slapped the battered, bulging file down on the coffee table and straightened.

"That's the real, need-to-know plan for the Foundation," he said. "That's the stuff that I promise you has not yet crossed your desk. That's the stuff that could kill it if I let you read it and you don't like it and you decide to do something about it. Threat to global security, threat to my security, whatever excuse you come up with -- read that and you can nip it right in the bud."

"Why in hell would you show me something like that? Put it away."

"You need an objective. You need a mission. I need to know that this isn't just going to go on and on the way it has been, no way out, no end in sight but death. There it is. There's my way out. There's your assignment. There's your choice."

"I'm not following you, Daniel."

"I don't want you to follow me. I want you to come with me. You asked if we'd be square if you went haring off with me the next time. I avoided answering you. I didn't know why. Now I know why. Here it is. Here's the next time."

"I can't lea-- "

"I'm not asking you to leave DHS before your plans come to fruition. I'm showing you that we're planting in the same field. You need some time for the other knee replacement before you can take on any kind of active duty again. Hayes has another two years in office. The Foundation needs at least that long to build up enough steam for what Catherine had in mind. A publicly acknowledged stargate program would make it a thousand times easier to fund and staff and provision an exploratory colony, not to mention establish it as a private venture unconnected to the United States military. Our goals overlap in significant ways. Why should operations like the Trust be the only ones scheming behind the scenes? Why should galactic powermongers be the only ones with an agenda? Why shouldn't you and I join forces?"

Jack stuck his hands in his pockets and considered the thing on the coffee table for a while. Then he pulled one hand out to give a vague, flighty wave. "Aren't you supposed to go down on one knee for a marriage proposal?"

"I go down on both knees whenever you want me to, Jack. Always have."

"I suppose this would give us something else to do when I visit besides fight and have sex."

"And eat. Sometimes we eat."

"You realize I will be extra specially pissed if I sign on for this and you die on me again before it comes through."

"It'll give you something different to talk about at my memorial."

"I did start to run out of material after the first couple." He sat down on the couch and pulled the file over and fiddled with the granny knot in the shoelace tie holding it together. "You said if this were a romance we'd have run off together a long time ago."

Daniel sat down next to him. "I was wrong. It is a romance. It's just not a fantasy. It's the real world, not make-believe, not a wistful daydream you sigh over because it'll never come true. If you're up for it, we'll run off together in a couple of years. Adults plan for these things, that's all. Romantic doesn't have to mean impulsive."

Jack untied the beat-up, dusty file and opened the flap on the tidy color-coded folders inside, the crisp laser-printed pages inside those, the spiral-bound projections and reports. "I could be willing to work for the happy ending," he said, in the light, airy, almost surprised way he sometimes said the most important things. Or the things he was most cautious about.

"So I'm willing to trust you with this," Daniel said. His racing heartbeat contradicted his calm tone. He didn't know if Jack could tell how scared he was. He was risking more than his own dreams and his own groundwork here. A lot of other people wanted this, had put a lot of work into it, had done a lot of things they could get in trouble for. Jack could be motivated to torpedo it for a variety of personal reasons, never mind the official reasons. He'd never expected to show this to the head of Homeworld; he'd never expected to wind up _recruiting_ the head of Homeworld. And that was more frightening than anything else: that he'd stopped seeing Jack as what Jack had taken that job to _be_, a promoted-from-within advocate and protector, and started seeing him as part of the military-industrial complex this project was attempting to slip out from under. "Go ahead and read. I can wait."

Jack read for two hours, asking questions from time to time, and a little after four he finally slid the last folder back into the file and said, "It's doable." He looked up slowly, a little sidelong, still bent toward the coffee table, pulling his elbows back to his knees, not quite making eye contact. Moved by what Daniel had just offered him, uncomfortable with how much it meant to him and how much he wanted it.

Except for the season, the time of day, the different light -- a pale autumn afternoon instead of an incandescent summer night -- it was exactly the way he'd looked six years ago when they'd sat on the sofa in his Colorado house and he'd leaned forward, out of the charged space between them, elbows on knees, fingertips on the rim of the beer bottle right at the edge of the coffee table, and looked partway back and said, "Is this what I think it is, Daniel?" So careful, so thrown by what he'd seen that Daniel thought he must have made a terrible inadvertent mistake. They'd been talking for nearly an hour about something they'd found offworld -- he couldn't remember now what it was, either what happened afterwards had swept everything else away and the memory never stuck or it was something he hadn't got back since his first ascension, the pathways were there but the neurons didn't always fire the first time he tried to access them -- and he'd thrown an arm across the back of the couch, turned towards Jack, tucking one leg up, leaning in to make his points ... he used to gesticulate so much more then ... and Jack had been leaning towards him, answering, engaged, working it through, one leg cocked open, his shoulder jammed into the back cushion ... and Jack had stopped talking, stopped moving, and Daniel had faltered, blinking, registering the intimate, comfortable position, the electric charge, the unconscious way they'd been drawing together ... how close his bent leg was to Jack's, how Jack was effectively tucked in under his arm. Jack had turned, calmly, deliberately, extricating himself, to plant his feet on the floor and his elbows on his knees and ground himself on his forgotten bottle of beer. The excuses and lies had mustered in Daniel's head like trained soldiers leaping to line up: claim obliviousness, wave it off as a topic that got him worked up, apologize for violating personal space, _yeah it's called friendship, Jack, it's called easy companionship, don't have some bisexual freakout, if I made a pass at you you'd know it_. But when Jack looked over his shoulder and said "Is this what I think it is, Daniel?" what he'd said was "I guess it is. I don't think it's only that, but yeah, I think so." Jack had been silent so long that he finally added, "I'm sorry. I'll go." And he'd shifted to rise to his feet, and Jack had twisted and caught his wrist, holding him, eyes stunned and scared and intense, and said, "Is this something you want it to be?" And Daniel had said yes, just yes, just the one word, and Jack had said, "It could only ever be just us, something like that. It would have to be completely under the radar. No team. No friends. Just us." And he'd said he understood, and Jack had said, "That's not what I want for you. I want you to be happy, Daniel. This isn't something I ever wanted for you ... " And Daniel had taken him by the chin with his free hand, slowly, firmly, and said, "But it's what you want for you?" And Jack had said yes as if his heart was breaking, as if he'd cracked under interrogation, and lifted his mouth to the kiss that Daniel's mouth offered, and moaned and opened for him, and groped for him when Daniel wrapped arms around, and six years later here they were. In the same place, on a couch oriented the opposite way with respect to the layout of the place, in his place instead of Jack's. Six years so far under the radar they'd dropped off their own screens.

Jack seemed to be remembering, too, because he huffed and shook his head and leaned back -- all the way back, so that he was slumped against the back of the couch -- and dropped a hand on Daniel's leg. A casual gesture of longtime intimacy, somewhere between comforting and possessive. "Ambitious but doable," he said, "and one thing you've overlooked, probably because of a very evident aversion to military presence, is the need for guys like me. So if you showed me this as a ... counteroffer, as something worthy and exciting and _glaringly needy_ enough to seduce me into accelerating my retirement plans, you've done your job. I accept. I'll work with you on this while I finish what I started in D.C. If we pull it off, I'll see it through with you."

"But?" Daniel prompted, after a moment where he tried hard not to.

"But if this is what it takes to fix us -- what does that mean? That without a job to glue us together, we're no good?"

Daniel thought about that for a long time. He thought about why Jack would think to ask that, why Jack would be afraid of that -- about everything Jack had told him over the years about his marriage, how the blacker the ops got the more he felt that he was the monster dwelling in the shadows of his happy home, his happy life, the disconnection he'd felt and felt helpless to stop; how good both he and Sara were at fixing broken things and solving problems unless the problem was their own brokenness; how their house and their son and their friends had been the glue holding them together as they gradually cracked apart. He thought about Sarah, who was in love with his work, not him, and fell out of love in direct proportion to how unpopular his work became; about how sad he'd been to realize that what he loved about her _was_ her love for his work, and how bitterly he turned away when she rejected the turn it was taking. He thought about Sha'uri, and how steadfastly he had loved her even as their goals and interests had diverged; he'd become obsessed with the cartouche, disappearing down there for hours, sometimes days, while she was busy with the politics of the city, parlaying her role in the uprising into a leadership position that not even the most staid of the elders could ignore. The consensus had been that she had the brains and her brother had the charisma, and that when Kasuf stepped down they would take his place jointly; they were the closest thing Abydos had to a prince and princess, and he'd always suspected that Apophis chose them as much for that hint of royalty as for how young and strong and pretty they were. He didn't know what would have happened if they hadn't unburied the gate, whether that marriage would have endured his increasing head-in-the-clouds abstraction and the increasing demands of her real-world responsibilities, but over that year, even as they'd both changed -- or both become even more what they'd been to start with -- the passion of their private life had never ebbed. The passion of his private life with Jack never ebbed, either, but there was some critical component missing, something he'd had with Sha'uri that he'd never had with Jack, something Jack had had with Sara that he'd never been able to bring himself to ...

"Daniel," Jack said. His tone was casual but had an undercurrent of warning.

"I'm not off in my head again," Daniel said. "I'm thinking. There's a difference." He could hear how distracted he sounded. He felt as if he almost had it, and it would be the most obvious thing in the universe once he grabbed hold of it, but his fingertips were fluttering in void, not connecting. "I'm right here ... " he said, vaguely, and frowned as something tried to spark from that, something about the concurrence of presence and absence, something ...

"What are you thinking _about_?" Jack said, too quietly, too patiently -- too much riding on this for him to sit back and watch Daniel work through it on his own.

"That's it," he said. His voice was soft but he turned to Jack with so much force in his body language that Jack, who was impossible to startle, gave a mild blink -- turned to him exactly the way he'd turned back then, one leg drawn up, arm thrown over the back of the couch, leaning. "That's what we never do, Jack. We never _stake anything on this_."

"I've been risking my career for six years. We risked the team. We risked the program."

"Not risk things for it, stake things _on_ it." He was framing the argument, the metaphor all wrong. Frustrated, he tried a different tack. "We don't need glue. There's plenty of glue. It's part of us. We're naturally adhesive. We have to _acknowledge_ the glue. We have to stop pretending there's no glue by doing things that should dissolve it." That wasn't it either, dammit.

"Acknowledge the glue," Jack echoed, his tone half what-the-fuck and half indulge-the-crazy-man.

"Yes, acknowledge, and you know, if you want me to answer you you could at least take the answer seriously, this rhetoric of mockery you always fall back on really pisses me off."

"The answer makes no sense, what am I supposed to do, nod sagely at the profound wisdom of whatever the _fuck_ you're saying?"

"Ask politely for clarification instead of -- "

"This is not your _classroom_, Profess-- "

"Just say 'I don't understand, Daniel,' is that so _fucking_ hard for you to do?"

Jack stared at him for a long minute, and Daniel stared back, keenly aware of the boneheaded stupidity of the exchange they'd just had, of how nothing Jack had said had merited this kind of flare-up from him, of how Jack calmly asked for clarification all the time and his accusation was totally unfair, of how he'd just picked a fight because he had actually figured it out but he couldn't find the right words and even he was afraid to hear what he'd say once he did find them.

When the minute had passed, Jack slowly raised his hand.

Daniel felt laughter bubble up, felt his own face contort against his effort to keep it straight. "Yes," he said, formally. "Jack."

"I don't understand, Daniel. Could you please clarify for me on the point of the glue?"

Daniel took a breath to calm the flutter of nervous laughter the way he'd take a drink of water to calm the hiccups. "We do everything we can to convince ourselves that no decision we make, no action we take is influenced by _us_ in any way. We've been the most important thing to each other for a long time and we can _not_ afford to be that and we take any opportunity to demonstrate that we're not. We _make_ opportunities to demonstrate it."

"OK," Jack said. "See, I _know_ how important you are to me. There's no 'maybe.'"

"Not how important I am to you. How important _we_ are to you." He shook his head, seeing no comprehension on Jack's face, deeply annoyed to find this so difficult to articulate. "I didn't think, right back at the start, to ask you if you'd want to be part of the colony project. It's perfect. It's what I want for you. It's what the project needs. I even dreamed about it, about you walking through that gate to join me. But it never occurred to me to just invite you. Why? Why would I shut out an idea like that?"

"Because you think I've set my sights on the Joint Chiefs or some crap like that. Because you think I'll be on the military's leash for the rest of my life, retirement or no. Because you think I'm one of Them now, this conception you have that the military and the government are an antagonist you have to outmaneuver."

"But I could have tried. 'Seduce,' you said. I could have made the effort, taken the shot. Tried to win you over to 'my' side, subvert you. _It never even crossed my mind_ until today."

"OK, so ... ?"

"Because I had to convince myself that anything I do from now on I have to do _without_ you in mind. Because I've been doing that for six years, training myself to keep us separate from everything else. I bet you did it too. I mean, you must have, you had to -- all those years you were in charge of me. The only way you could have handled it is if you boxed us up and put us away. Complete and leakproof separation of our private and professional lives. The job was never what held us together, Jack -- it couldn't be. We actively prevented it from being that, because the alternative was to compromise the program and our team and everyone's safety. We got so good at denying that we exist that we couldn't stop. The farther removed you got from direct responsibility for me in the field, the harder we scrambled to prove that we didn't have _that_ kind of relationship."

"I thought I explained Kerry to you."

"You did, and I'm not saying all that wasn't part of it too. But the thing that was making you nuts about me, the way I shut down -- it's all interconnected, it's all the same thing. Affairs and flings, psychological distance, deliberately accepting postings that will separate us ... What do you think, what goes through your mind when some woman in Washington comes on to you and you make the decision to go for it? Can you tell me, honestly?"

"You seem pretty sure you have the answer. You tell me."

"Actually, wait, I'm assuming that's how it works, but maybe that's not your MO, maybe the pursuit is more your thing -- "

"Noooo, that's how it works all right. I never went looking, Daniel. I don't go looking. That's no excuse, so I don't see what difference it makes, but in case it matters to you that's how it's been since Kerry, I've just ... I'm easier than I used to be, that's all. She had to push pretty hard." He shifted uncomfortably, made a face. "Do we have to do this? I know, this is what we're doing now, and anything I promise you about being done with that means squat, but -- "

"What I think you say to yourself, in so many words or not, is 'What the hell, it's not like I'm married.' Is it?"

Jack looked down, frowning. Making an obvious effort to think about something he never gave any thought, undoubtedly wanted to give no thought ever, and answer as accurately as he could. A pang of hurt went through Daniel's heart to see it, a feeling of _god we are so fucked up, why am I doing this to him, it's not like we can fix this_. He almost told Jack to forget it, he was probably wrong anyway, _me and my fucking epiphanies, it's not worth it, never mind_. Somehow he bit the words back, the same old 'it doesn't matter' words, and waited, and finally Jack looked up and said, "It's not so much 'what the hell.' It's more like 'fuck it, helps my cover and it's for the best anyway.'"

It was the confirmation he'd been looking for, it was more resounding confirmation than he'd expected, and it was so sad and so painful to hear that he looked away before he could stop it, before he could make it look like anything other than the flinch it was.

Jack said, "Crap," in a low voice.

"It's OK -- I asked, I just got so into making my point that I forgot to brace for how much it was going to hurt."

"I didn't mean for the best _for you_."

"I know." He gave his head a little shake as that came through. Of course Jack would think that. As soon as he opened his mouth he probably winced to hear himself say exactly what Daniel had told him not to say -- that it was for his own good. But he'd turned his head by then and didn't see the presumed wince. "I heard it the way you meant it. As long as you're sleeping with other people, you're not completely invested in me. As long as we're both doing it, we're not ... betraying each other in all those other ways, because this isn't something that behavior like that is a betrayal _of_. Defining what this isn't, over and over again. It's what I thought. It's what I was angling you into saying. It's OK."

"Daniel. It's not OK. We are married. That's always been the joke that hid the truth. We've been married since that day, that day that this so freakishly feels _exactly like_. We've just been killing ourselves to pretend we're not. That's what you're saying, right?"

Daniel nodded. He couldn't figure out how to tell Jack that his feelings weren't hurt, he just felt gut-punched with the tragedy of the whole thing.

"And now you're giving up on us," Jack said. "Right on the verge of a possible solution. Why do you _do_ that?"

Daniel forced his head to turn, found Jack watching him with his head cocked. Not exasperated, not accusing; bewildered. And completely right. "It's an improvement," he said. "Not a solution. You still won't be here. I'll still be going out there."

"But with a purpose. A timeframe. An understanding of where we stand. A shared objective. That's not enough?"

"I can't ask you for that kind of commitment. To the project, sure, great, but -- "

"_You already have it._" Jack leaned forward and took him by the chin, the jaw, a weird shock of bare hand on his face. "Daniel," he said, his dark eyes roving over lips and brow and everything in between, "Daniel, Daniel" -- the loving affection in his voice making his name a gentle rebuke. "Isn't that the whole point? The big C?"

"We can't just hug and make promises now."

"Why the hell not?"

"Jack ... " He tried to shake Jack's hand off, pull his head out of the grip, but Jack only leaned in closer, only got more into his face.

Jack wasn't letting go. He was waiting for an answer. Daniel didn't have an answer. There was no answer. He'd given all the answer he had, offered all the explanation he could find. He was hungry for Jack's mouth, he was desperate for Jack to opt for sex and let him off the hook, and he was panicking at the promises a kiss would imply, promises he'd never intended to force, a resolution he'd never intended to push for, he'd only been trying to _understand_ this, _explain_ it --

"Daniel," Jack said, pushing him down on the couch, breathing into his open, wordless mouth. "You nailed the problem. This is good. I'm happy with this. Why aren't you happy with this?"

"Why are you pinning me down?" Daniel managed.

"Because this is how _I_ keep _you_ from getting up and walking away, and because you're in twice the shape I am these days and you can throw me if you want to." Jack brushed his mouth over Daniel's lips, gently, breathing. "And because it turns you on and sometimes if I get you hot enough you tell me the truth." He reached down and dragged Daniel's bent leg out from between them, and Daniel moaned because he couldn't help hooking it around Jack's ass, pulling him closer when he should be pushing him to arm's length, pulling Jack's hard groin against his. "So tell me why it's OK to identify a problem but not commit to solving it, huh?"

"I've never used this, I've never traded on this, _I have never asked anything of you_ ... "

Jack pulled up and looked down at him. "And now it's time to let that go. All that energy you put into expecting nothing from me? Much better things to focus that on now." He dropped his head again, light hints of kisses, teasing, not quite delivering. "You didn't expect to fix this, did you. All you wanted was to figure it out." He turned Daniel's face to the side and swirled his lips along Daniel's jaw and up to his ear. "But we're gonna be OK now. So suck it up. No more running away. Not from each other."

Daniel moaned again, pathetically, he thought, as Jack rubbed between his legs and spiraled a tongue tip down into his ear. "Can we run away into the bedroom?"

"I dunno," Jack said. "I'm kinda likin' it here. We started on a sofa."

"No lube out here. And we moved it to the bed pretty fast, as I recall."

"Because we creamed the place in about ninety seconds."

"Ah, yes, the fumbling attempt at mutual masturbation and the frenzied humping."

"I never did get those stains out after they set."

"I miss that couch."

"No you don't. You miss the cushions that were upside-down all those years and only you knew why."

"You could have had it reupholstered."

"I sure could. And I never did." With a hard kiss down into his neck, Jack pushed up and off him, then stood and held a hand out to pull him up after. "I'll trade you for the bed, but you're on top this time."

Daniel followed him in, stayed behind him as he reached the bed, thought about tearing the UCLA shirt off him, settled for lifting it up and off and tossing it aside. He ran fingernails down Jack's back and up his sides, appreciating the groan and the flex of muscle; Jack might not be in peak field trim these days, but if you got that body to arch and tense there was very little softness to it. He pressed himself up against it, cupped the hard-on through the sweats, pushed his into the muscled clench of ass; he tilted his head and closed his teeth lightly on Jack's spine at the base of his neck, then bit down a little more as Jack's cock twitched against his palm. He could have bitten harder, scratched harder if he wanted to, sucked hard if he wanted to; teeth marks, scratches, hickeys weren't gender-specific outside of a forensics lab, and the dress code at the Pentagon covered more acreage than SGC fatigues. He kissed down the vertebrae instead, one by one, lingering, until bending low and turning his body pulled his hips away from Jack's ass, and he was holding the elastic on the sweats down to get his lips on the soft hair running down into the crack. Then he straightened and said, "Down," and watched the ripple of muscle as Jack kneed up onto the bed and eased down on his face.

He put one knee on the mattress and leaned down to grab the waistband of the sweats. Jack lifted his butt to have them stripped off him the way he'd lifted his arms for the shirt to come off. Daniel kept pulling, all the way down his legs and off, which forced Jack's weight off his knees before his cock sprang all the way back and left it peeking out from under one hip while Daniel stepped back with the sweats half inside-out in his hands. He briefly considered keeping his clothes on, for a psychological advantage he didn't have to put any effort into, but he didn't want to be dressed, he wanted bare skin against bare skin, so he tossed his shirt and pants after the sweats and stretched out next to Jack, stealing a few moments to savor the warm slide of nakedness while he fished out the lube, which had gotten shoved inside the pillowcase, and dug the condoms from between the mattress and the box spring. Then he took his glasses off and laid them on Jack's back, a subtle command to not roll over, and pushed his hand down flat on Jack's ass and scooched down to shove his face between hip and bedding and lay a wet lick across the head of Jack's cock. Jack quivered under his hand but didn't raise up or try to turn. Daniel got up on his knees between Jack's legs, keeping that hand on him, setting the lube to the side, and said, "Lift." Jack lifted a slow, careful few inches, straight up so as not to dislodge the glasses. Daniel reached under and slowly, carefully pulled Jack's cock towards him. "Down again," he said, with a gentle pat, "and spread a little," and Jack eased down and opened his legs, groaning as Daniel nestled his dick into the bedding, pointing straight down between his thighs.

Now he couldn't stimulate himself by thrusting against the mattress, or even reach himself to jerk off, and Daniel didn't have to turn him over or reach around to touch his penis while he was fingering him. It was hotter than he'd expected to see him like this, and judging from the low sounds Jack was making it felt pretty hot too; Daniel had never arranged him like this, so unless someone else had, this was the first time. He stroked the back of his finger down the shaft, ran his knuckle over the velvety head, heard Jack moan softly into the sheets; heightened sensitivity, then, too. And good potential for orgasm deferral, if he fucked him like this. He grabbed the bottle and flipped the cap and spread Jack's cheeks with his fingers to pour the lube, and he could feel Jack straining against the urge to lift into it. The lube dripped down around his bunched scrotum, channeling off to either side instead of running between his balls to touch his shaft. Daniel left it like that, left his cock dry, and stroked his thumb up the crack to rub the slickness into the hole, and penetrate him.

Jack groaned and shuddered as Daniel's thumb went up into him. Daniel rocked his hand for a while, fucking him slow and easy while he ran the backs of his fingers up and down the now rigidly hard cock, then turned his hand and corkscrewed his thumb on a deeper push. He pressed just underneath the gland, and pinched gently around Jack's distended glans, little nipping pinch-tugs that made twitches run up the back of Jack's legs and a more breathless sound come out of his mouth. When he swapped two fingers for the thumb, he closed his other fingers overhand around as much of the cock as he could get without scooping it up, and rubbed that thumb lightly over the sweet spot on the exposed underside while his fingertips found and lightly rubbed the prostate. Jack bucked a little, grunting, holding his hips mostly still through an audible effort of will, and Daniel eased off, eased his fingers out, went back to light backhand stroking; there was a fine line between stimulation and torment, and he was never completely sure how far over Jack wanted go, but he knew what he was comfortable with and he didn't like pushing past it.

He had some thought of leaning down to lick Jack's cock dripping when he pushed three fingers in, but he'd have to step off onto the floor for that, Jack's body was too long and the bed not long enough, and he was comfortable where he was, and positioned well to lean over and push up into him, so he slowly gave him the three fingers, and reached for the condoms with the other hand. A long time since he'd had to tear a packet open with his teeth -- as long as it had been since he'd last seen Jack. He got the thing rolled on left-handed, thinking now that despite all the progress they'd made and all the promises Jack kept trying to make the longed-for day of latex-free intercourse was farther away than it had seemed before, and he'd almost rather go back to those days of desperate humping, simultaneous handjobs, all the flesh-on-flesh sex they'd had before they'd ever learned to do this.

"Daniel," Jack said, a hoarse muffle into the bedding, taking him completely by surprise because for some reason they almost never talked when he was the one in control. "If you're not into this, let's stop. Or bring me off with your hands. I'm just about there, it won't take much."

"I'm very into this," Daniel said, wondering why he kept being surprised by Jack's ability to pick up on his smallest cues. "I'm just not very into latex."

"Six months," Jack said.

"Something else to work toward, huh?" Daniel said, pushing up and over Jack, planting a hand to either side, leaning down to kiss one shoulder blade.

"You don't believe me about the extracurriculars," Jack said.

Daniel reached between them to stroke Jack's penis one more time, brush knuckles over his balls, and then took hold of himself and rubbed the head of his dick up to the hole. He said, "We'll talk about it after this," and on 'this' he _pushed_, slow and steady and sure.

He knew exactly how to do this. He knew exactly how Jack liked it, the long steady entry, no teasing, no thrusting until he'd been fully penetrated, completely filled. Penetration for Jack was overwhelming, every time, a swelling surge of disbelief that he could be spread and taken like this, that he was letting himself be spread and taken, that it was Daniel's thick, heavy cock filling him. He knew exactly how fast to go, how hard to push to give him that perfect rush, and that long-familiar intimacy and _known_ness was a moment of recognition so intensely beautiful that when he was fully seated he _couldn't_ thrust. For a moment it was all he could do to breathe.

He dropped his head to the side of Jack's neck and pressed his face into Jack's skin, mouthed Jack's name into it, silently. He wanted to move his glasses and sink down into him but he didn't think he could take all his weight on one arm right now and he couldn't reach them with his mouth. He managed a slow push, and listened to the shuddery breath Jack let out. A firmer push got an exhalation with more voice to it. He worked up to slow, powerful thrusts from his thighs, visualizing Jack's dick stretched down under them, between them, untouched except by the bedding and the air. His ass was so tight, so hot ... he smelled so good, so right, so _him_ ...

Jack groaned through clenched teeth, a long harsh _nnnnngggg_ of conflicting impulses echoed by a hard, futile contraction of muscle, inside and out -- wanting to come, not wanting to come, needing more stimulation on his cock, wildly turned on by the denial of it. "Daniel," he said again, shakier than before. "Talk to me. _Please_."

They never talked when he was in control because he was always silent, because he didn't think Jack wanted him to talk, because it was distracting, because he sounded idiotic to himself when he talked in bed, because there were no words for how this felt, because because because ...

"Open your legs more," he said, lifting his head, pushing his bent arms straight. Moaning, Jack obeyed him, and he pushed in deeper, thrusting from his lower back, right up flush against him, his balls resting on Jack's. "You're so _fucking_ hot like this," he said. "When you open up and let me have you." Jack groaned deeply, and Daniel lengthened his strokes, fucking Jack in a tight, fluid rhythm, up on his arms, his dick up Jack's ass their only physical point of contact. He stayed connected to him through his voice and his ears, describing everything he felt and listening to the sounds Jack made in response. Jack liked it fast and deep but not hard, so he sped up, not thinking about what he was saying anymore, babbling about how much he loved him, how much he loved this, getting hoarse "yeah"s and "fuck"s and "god"s in return, more "fuck"s as Jack got closer but couldn't tip over, sounds of intense pleasure and pleading frustration.

Jack's whole body was shaking, but he wasn't coming. He wasn't going to come like this; it was too effective an orgasm-denial position. Daniel slowed down again, and managed to pick up a hand and get his glasses off Jack's back and onto his face before his other arm gave out. He drew breath to ask Jack to raise up for him, get his hips off the bed so he could reach under.

"Daniel," Jack said, suddenly, very clearly. "Pull out."

"It's OK," Daniel said, "just lift with me, lift up, let me get at your cock."

"No," Jack said. "Out. Lemme turn."

Daniel slowed to a stop, thinking Jack must need a break from the face-down position, maybe wanted to be sucked. Swallowing saliva at the prospect, he withdrew carefully and got out from between Jack's legs. Jack flipped over and lay on his back for a minute, cupping his groin while his breathing slowed down to something closer to its regular rate. Then he rolled his head and asked, "You up for finishing this way?"

"Um ... " Daniel said on a rising note, willing but puzzled, images flashing through his mind of Jack arching and spasming into his mouth, of kneeling over him with his cock in his hand gushing come all over the wet drape of penis and testicles, of finishing on top of him rubbing his still twitching dick into the creamy-cool fleshy softness, questions sparking off the lightning fantasy, was Jack offering skin in response to the latex complaint, had he not been delivering the fuck Jack wanted, had the stretch in his dick started to hurt and Jack didn't want to tell him, did Jack crave some dominating aggression he wasn't wired to provide, had the hard kiss in the kitchen been a promise he'd failed to make good on. " ... what way?"

"The way where I lie back and watch you jerk me off while you fuck me."

Jack's expression was relaxed, open, pleasantly expectant, but his phrasing was very deliberate and his eyes watched Daniel carefully. Daniel watched him back, moving between his legs again, warming hands over his thighs, his belly, staying connected, buying time. They'd never done it this way. Jack had never asked and he'd never pushed, never turned him on his back and tried to get in no matter how much he'd wanted to. He'd assumed it would feel like too feminine a position for Jack, make penetration too uncomfortably gender-reversed an act; he'd left it for Jack to roll over for him if he chose to, and Jack never had, so he'd let it go. He almost said _Why now?_ but squelched it, stroking down Jack's inner thighs instead, dropping his gaze to the hard, tight package between them, running his thumbs up the creases of groin. Was Jack trying to offer himself as a substitute for the women he imagined Daniel doing in this position? Or trying to keep him in visual range while he came, in case he whited out again? He swirled his fingertips over Jack's balls, grasped his dick and twisted lightly up and off; he wouldn't still be this hard if he was scared, or if what he was asking for was something that turned him off. Glancing up without lifting his head, he found Jack's eyes darkly glazed by the touch of his hands, but with a sharp glint of scrutiny in the depths: still waiting to see how he'd react.

Carefully, as lightly as he could, Daniel said, "You want this for you? Or for me?"

"I've always wanted this. You never went for it, so I thought you didn't. Thought it crossed too many wires. You want to just suck me and flip me over and finish the regular way, that's fine. There was only one way to find out."

_You know, you should talk more too,_ a slightly stunned voice in Daniel's head said as his erection swelled to a throb inside the condom, a hot flooding pulse of blood in response to Jack's description of the alternative. Maybe he had more of an urge to manhandle Jack than he thought; he found his hands squeezing the backs of Jack's thighs, pushing up to roll him and open him, before he'd even formulated an answer. "Jack," he said, his throat thick, his voice dropped half an octave, his weight dropped into his thighs as he lined up his hips and slotted into position and _leaned_, "Jack ... fuck ... "

"So that'd be a -- yes -- ?" Jack said, voice hitching as Daniel's cockhead breached him, night-dark eyes fixed hotly on where Daniel was pushing into his body. "Fuuuuck," he groaned through the long slide of entry, fingers clutching at the sheets, eyes wincing shut, head falling back, throat exposed, mouth open. Daniel had twice the leverage in this position and an easy angle on the prostate, and he worked it, watching Jack, mesmerized by what became visible to him this way: the ripples down Jack's abs, the instant contraction of flat nipples to hard points when he was filled, the way ecstasy pulled his lips back from his teeth. He cradled Jack's legs in his arms and worked him and watched him until Jack writhed with a broken moan. His own body was surging up a crest and he had to ease off before he lost control.

"You ready to come?" he said, pushing deep and holding there to brace Jack's butt while he slid his right arm out from around Jack's leg. "You want to watch?"

Jack made a scratchy affirmative sound, flopping a hand up in a sloppy grope for a pillow. Daniel leaned forward to grab it and double it and stuff it behind Jack's head, and what that did to the angle and pressure of his erection inside Jack made both of them go still. Then Jack said, "_God,_" sharply, and Daniel grunted as he tugged and punched the pillow to support Jack's neck. Jack's leg was trying to lock on his back, heeling and slipping, and he got his other arm free too and then hugged both thighs to help lift until Jack got his ankles hooked. It freed him to lean, to touch, to stroke, and he smoothed his fingers over breastbone and nipples and ribs as Jack's eyes finally blinked open. "Good?" he asked in a low voice, pressing and easing with his hips.

"Way better than," Jack said, reaching to give one of his hands a weak squeeze, then take hold of it and guide it down the front of his body.

"Back OK?" Daniel said, and wrapped that hand warmly around Jack's cock, turning the other to gently massage his balls.

"OK enough," Jack said, flashing him a glance somewhere between conspiratorial and warning, telling him that they weren't lying to each other anymore but Daniel shouldn't even think about using the truth as a reason to stop. Then he looked down at Daniel's hands on him, and his eyes went soft with longing, and he reached between his legs and put his hands on Daniel's. He stroked the knuckles, explored the curve of the fingers. "God, Daniel," he said in a low voice, almost a whisper.

Daniel squeezed and rubbed, around and over, corkscrewing and pulling. Jack's fingertips rode his hands, sending shivers up his arms and through his belly. The thick wet heat of Jack's ass tightened down on him, and he probed it with his cock, deep and slow; it felt as if the thin layer of latex was all that stood between him and the orgasm coiling from the base of his spine through his groin and up to the tip of his cock, a spring he was barely keeping compressed. He turned his hand to flatten the fingers on the top of Jack's cock, press them into the resistance of thumb on the underside, start working him up and down. Jack was watching his fingers, hypnotized, but when Daniel shifted a little, closing his thighs in an unconscious effort to support him better when he came, Jack's eyes widened and he said "Ah -- ah, _fuck_" and his head fell back and his body started to shake.

Daniel bent forward, reaching out instinctively with his left hand. Jack's dropped head had collapsed the doubled pillow, and when he wrenched up, groaning, shaking, reaching, still desperate to _see_, Daniel cupped the nape of his neck and held his head up for him. Jack's hands touched the outsides of his elbows, fingertips light on the knobs of bone. Jack whispered, "Faster." Daniel doubled the speed of his right hand, whipping it on him while he gripped Jack's neck and ground deep into his ass, holding him tight between the two points of pressure.

"Daniel?" Jack said in a strange, small voice as he started to come, and looked up at him, into his eyes, pleading and fierce and absolutely vulnerable.

"I'm here," Daniel told him, "I'm right here, I'm coming too -- "

He _was_ coming, he couldn't stop it, and his hand on Jack caught the reflexive motion he used on himself when he climaxed, fast tight jerky pulls. Jack let out a string of anguished _huh_s, and gushed fluid. His ass clenched like a fist around Daniel's cock, and Daniel pulsed and pulsed into that interior darkness, deep in the mystery of flesh. The outside universe expanded away to nonexistence around the darkness of Jack's eyes, the bright glaze of his orgasm, both of them curled around his spurting cock, shaking apart around and inside each other. He was saying Jack's name, over and over again, gripping him, buried in him, staring into his eyes in a kind of shock; Jack's hands were locked on his arms, fingers clawing into muscle, bone; his thighs were trembling from the strain of lifting Jack three-quarters off the bed.

"Oh, _god_," he said, blinking into awareness of how they'd ended up, blinking into Jack's eyes. "Oh my god," he said, trying to ease Jack's butt down, an awkward shift from knee to knee that rubbed him around inside Jack's ass and made both of them jerk through a series of afterspasms. "Yeah," Jack said, a shaky soft huff, moving his hand to the side of Daniel's head, and then groaned, low and long, as Daniel thumbed his cock, trying to coax a few last drops out.

He swept his gaze down over Jack's body, the big rangy hard-boned body he still held curled in his grip, belly splashed with come, chest hair lightly matted with perspiration. He was hungry to lick him, taste him, but coordination and spatial comprehension had completely deserted him, and he had no idea how to start disengaging their locked bodies.

It must have shown on his face, because when his gaze came back up he found Jack laughing at him, gently, soundlessly. "First you pull out," Jack said, "'cause that baby stays hard for a while and you try to get all the legs straightened out with that inside me you're gonna bend it in half."

"OK," Daniel said, doubtfully, and winced through a withdrawal he couldn't control well enough to make smooth, then grunted when his cock slipped free and he felt the condom stay behind.

"Get that after," Jack said, scrunching fingers through his hair, stilling him, calming him. "Legs now. And you can let go of my neck."

"OK," Daniel said, relaxing his left hand the moment he realized it was still gripping Jack by the nape, sliding it down to his chest and then off to the side for the leverage to push his legs straight and give Jack's legs room to come down.

Jack flattened himself out with a moan of relief and a bounce of legs on mattress, then said, "But really, any time you feel the urge to do that neck thing. Goes straight down my backbone." Daniel gave a tug on the condom and looked up, Jack nodded, and when Daniel pulled it out Jack's hips twisted and he said, "Aaaand that goes straight back up. I don't know why you hate that feeling. Feels good to me."

Daniel went out to dump it in the toilet, and came back to find Jack on his side, lazily swirling a finger through the translucent smears on his stomach. He joined him on the bed and went to lick it off, but he'd only gotten about half when Jack pulled him up into a long, deep kiss, throwing an arm and a leg over him, pulling him close. "I wasn't trying to be a substitute for anything," he said when he pulled back, tugging the pillow down under their heads and then tucking that arm between them, stroking Daniel's throat. "If that's what you thought."

"It's one of the things," Daniel said. He had to tilt his face up to keep the pillow from pushing his glasses askew, so he took them off and stretched around to dump them on the night table, and shivered when Jack took the opportunity to run an appreciative hand over his chest. "But the thing about that," he said, coming back around, settling in -- and then he wasn't sure what to say. The caress of Jack's hand over his pecs seemed to sum it up, in a funny way. Jack loved his body. He knew that. But there were other things that Jack loved too, that he could never be.

Jack waited for a while, stroking warmly down his back and over his hip, then said, "You gonna finish that sentence?"

"I guess not right now," he replied. Too sated, too comfortable, too happy just looking at the sated relaxation of Jack's features, all the strain smoothed away, the blanching of long office hours replaced by a postcoital warmth.

"'Cause there's some stuff I want to get straight with you, some stuff I want you to understand. I don't want to fight about this. I just want to tell you."

"Jack, I'm not going to accept some vow of fidelity from you, bisexuality is what it is and in the ways that really matter this has been the most faithful and enduring relationship of my life, I'm not gonna sweat the other stuff, I'm pretty sure that the for want of any more remotely accurate term sexual jealousy was a displacement ... of ... " He wound down because Jack wasn't interrupting, wasn't cutting him off, was just smiling at him, hearing him out, waiting until he was finished. "This is where you say 'aht.'"

"Not anymore," Jack said. "Not in bed, anyway. No promises about my behavior on any future offworld gigs. Finish."

"I interrupted you. You go ahead."

"A displacement of what? Your simmering resentment at being shut out of my life when I walked away from you and the program into the political wilderness? Your deep-seated conflicts about this marriage we kept secret even from ourselves?"

The melodramatic tone and phrasing failed to undercut either the insight or the complex articulation of it. "You know, that creeps me the _hell_ out," Daniel said. Then, "Yes."

"So as long as we've got a future to work toward, you're fine with me stepping out on you."

"It's not 'stepping out' if you have permission. Which is a word I feel really uncomfortable saying, but ... I guess the habit of steering clear of anything implying commitment isn't that easy to break."

"I like commitment, Daniel. Commitment solves a lot of problems for me. Commitment makes me happy. I'm possessive and that's my problem and I'll deal with it -- you, I want to have whatever you want. But I also want you to stop with the one-night stands that make you feel like shit and probably aren't doing the women any favors either. Not that one night with you wouldn't be worth a little heartache, but you've never gone for the predatory type, so I don't think I'm being too obnoxiously paternalistic to spare a thought for the hurt feelings."

That touched off more bleakness than guilt, and Daniel sighed, more resigned than irritated. "Most of them are free spirits, not looking for attachment, pretty easy about however things go. I'd've stopped a long time ago if all I did was hurt people. But I take your point about hurting myself -- which _is_ obnoxiously paternalistic, by the way. But also true."

"So while it's on the table and you're not too pissed at me, let me just float the idea that maybe that's a candidate for the find-a-better-way approach. I don't have a better way to get you what you need there, except maybe an escort service, but -- " He pulled up short, and Daniel didn't jump in, but waited for him, the way Jack had waited for him earlier. "I spent a lot of years listening to you talk about how bad you felt after that stuff, and then a couple of years not hearing a word, and it's ... my fault that you went back to it."

"Because everything I do to fuck myself up is your fault."

"Yup."

"There's already a better way. It's the same better way. Those were a good two years. Things aren't the same as they were then, but it's the same solution. I feel very much the antithesis of shit right now. Eureka."

"Problem solved, just like that."

"Just like this," Daniel said, tightening his arm around Jack, giving a gentle rubbing thrust with his hips. "I don't need women, not the way you do. I can keep myself reasonably satisfied in your absence, and if you think you might be able to voyeuristically eroticize the idea of me and that drawer full of unused sex toys, you'd relieve me of some really weird guilt and make that even easier."

"You can fall into bed with some Starbucks barista but you can't stick a vibrator up your ass?"

"It's wacked," he said, deliberately using Jack terminology. "I know."

Jack was smiling, shaking his head. His dick stirred lazily against Daniel's groin, sending an answering tingle through Daniel's, and he shifted to pull the pillow down more firmly under his neck. "Permission to go to town with the toys, Daniel. Especially if I get to watch the inaugural application in person."

Daniel flashed on an image of that, of Jack watching him buck uncontrollably while he worked a toy inside himself, of begging Jack to suck him when he couldn't stand it anymore, of Jack's strong, hard mouth engulfing his cock, hot wet tongue and cold dry lips. He was almost embarrassed when Jack's hand pressed the left side of his chest to echo his racing heartbeat back at him -- teasing him with his own evident response. "I'd like that," he said, stating the obvious a little lamely, a little distractedly as his mind leaped ahead with his heart and almost made him ask something he really probably shouldn't ask. He'd find his own way, when Jack was gone, when the inevitable phone calls came, the heads-up that something might happen, the report that something had; he'd find some way to embed it in his own libido, make it hot for himself, make lemonade.

"OK," Jack said. "You can spill it or I can guess. But you don't get to keep it all in there anymore." He ran his hand over Daniel's head, an affectionate hair-tousle, midway between rough and gentle, and then stroked the back of his hand down Daniel's cheek, sanding knuckles on the stubble. When Daniel chose to savor the touch instead of answer right away, Jack said, "My guess is, every time I touch your chest it sets off the I'll-never-have-breasts alarm. Is that it?"

Daniel laughed aloud, dislodging Jack's hand, which settled onto the outside of his shoulder. "It's a little less Judy Blume and a little more Jean-Paul Sartre, and I killed that alarm about fifteen minutes ago when I put my glasses over there, but yeah, something like that. It's not -- " _a big deal, don't worry about it, never mind_. He took a breath. "I want to ask you how you do that eroticizing thing. How you make that work for you."

Jack nodded, slowly and seriously. "OK. But I need to tell you what I was going to tell you first."

"OK," Daniel said, reluctantly, fighting the impulse to head it off again, preemptively reject what he was sure Jack was going to say, change the subject, anything. _I can live with it,_ he thought. _I can live with it if we just don't make it real by talking about it._ Some voyeuristic fantasist he was going to be.

"OK. There've been four women in seven months, two of them overnighters, and every one of those times, sex was a tactical decision. Yeah I was pretending we didn't have what we have, yeah I figured you were off doing your thing so what the fuck, but the first couple of offers that came along, I accepted because it would look good on my resumé."

"Excuse," Daniel said, tonelessly, automatically. The noun, meaning rationalization, justification. Middle English via Anglo-French. _Ex causa_, from the cause. Sometimes it meant explanation, even apology. Not this time.

"Bad reason, maybe," Jack said. "Excuse to do something I wanted to do, no. The better I got at the game out there the more aggressive people got about probing for weaknesses, and there were too many pings about my orientation to ignore. First one was obviously thrown at me to see if a female would stick, second one was trying to sleep her way through me to someone past me. Nothing but ulterior motive on both sides in both cases."

Daniel could imagine Jack rising to the implied challenge. That the challenge had come at all was disquieting, but he doubted it had anything to do with him. Just a feeler, as Jack said. A pro-forma attack on a potentially vulnerable flank the military built in with its own rules. There was little question that he'd been probed about Sam, too -- and little question that they'd thrown some men at him as well. A game of pawns, everyone watching to see which ones you took. He tried to picture Jack demonstrating how well he performed in bed with a woman. He'd have been thorough. He'd have taken some pride in it. When he decided that it was his job to get you off as powerfully as possible, he did it with a flat single-minded focus. Imagining him bringing that focus to bear on someone else made Daniel feel more sympathetic than jealous, and didn't spark the excitement he was trying to make it spark at all.

Which, he knew perfectly well, was why Jack had chosen now for the full-disclosure run-down of his activities. "OK," he said. "So, that's two."

"Third one was a journalist, had a hunch that I was in the upper echelon of some top-secret defense agency, thought she could get me to let something slip in the afterglow. I went ahead and did what leads to afterglow so I could feed her some bullshit that sent her off chasing ghosts at the NSA."

Jack's voice was gruff with an undertone of loathing. It was the same tone that crept into his voice the rare times he talked about his history in black ops. The sympathy in Daniel bloomed into something that felt like pity, which Jack would sense, which would be very bad, and then settled into an aching compassion. He understood, suddenly -- it was almost blinding, a white-blind glare, a brief flash of the same whiteness that tried to suck him away before, and in the same moment he realized that it was what happened when he didn't want to face something -- how Jack could genuinely not want him to subject himself to any more of those bleak rolls in the hay. They weren't just depressing. They were soul-sucking, damaging. Not morally, not ethically, not as betrayals -- just in themselves. Not because they were sex, but because they weren't intimacy. They were intimacy's diametric opposite. They only redoubled the loneliness, made the gaping absence more gaping. For Jack as much as for him.

He'd felt excluded. He'd been looking for a way to include himself in what he conceived of as Jack's intimate heterosexual life. But the only intimate life of any kind Jack had was with him. He was trying to insert himself into something that didn't exist. He'd felt excluded from something that didn't exist.

"And the last one?" he asked, trying to brace himself, thinking it had to be the worst. Thinking that everything he'd just realized could be undone, disproven by whatever story Jack told next. Thinking he should tell Jack what he was thinking; unwilling to derail this report Jack felt he needed to give; knowing that _was_ an excuse, that in truth he was afraid to tell Jack what he was thinking in case his latest grand epiphany was about to be vaporized. Afraid to be wrong.

Jack let out a harsh sigh. "I had a bad week about a month ago and drank too much at a fundraiser. I'm lucky the worst thing I did was let some uniform-happy socialite drag me back to her pied-à-terre." Daniel realized that he'd braced literally, his hands on Jack's chest, and that Jack was gripping his shoulder hard, too hard, apparently oblivious of doing it -- hanging on to him too. "As you know firsthand, Mr. Happy does not cooperate when I'm tanked, and an uncooperative Mr. Happy in the presence of a plastic surgeon's walking vacation home does not help my straight-guy resumé at _all_. By the time the story came back to me on the grapevine, I was a gentlemen's gentleman with secret cunnilingus superpowers. I had just enough pieces the next day to figure out how I pulled my ass out of the fire -- I remember some grandiose declaration about not taking advantage of a lady in her cups, I remember her starting to get pissed, I remember thinking _crap I don't want to do this_ when I went down on her, I remember leaving a painfully genteel note on the pillow after the booze and the orgasm knocked her out. Mostly I remember walking into my townhouse and locking the door behind me. How great it was to be out of that shit. How much it sucked that you weren't there. I don't remember getting home, but I was down thirty bucks so I'm thinkin' taxi. That was the night I conked out five minutes after you answered the phone."

"Two minutes," Daniel said. His heart ached but he was shaky with relief. He gentled his hands, moved one down to Jack's waist; Jack's grip on his shoulder relaxed into an unconscious massage. "You said you missed Colorado like hell, and said 'Do you know what I mean? Do you get what I'm saying?' about five times, and I finally said that I really really _really_ knew what you meant and you should go to sleep now, and you did."

"I guess I meant you."

"It was fairly clear to me that you meant me. It was also a comfort to know that you could be that wasted and still not say anything compromising on the phone."

"I'm sorry about that call."

"I'm glad you called. I'm sorry I wasn't there in the bed when you fell into it. Or close enough to come get you." Before Jack could say it, or feel bad about not saying it, he added, "But not there at the shindig with you. I reject any fantasy that subjects me to the rubber-chicken circuit."

"I hope you're getting what I'm saying here. I hope I don't have to ask you five times. I do not screw around recreationally. I'm a cold-hearted son of a bitch out there and I'm not proud of those encounters, but three of them served a purpose and on those grounds, given where I thought we stood at the time, I don't regret them. Unless very calculated, very competitive, very un-fun sex turns your crank, there was nothing erotic about them. Just people using their bodies to manipulate each other. If I never do anything like that again it'll be too soon."

_But you might have to_. No. Not doing that anymore. Not making the presumptive, preemptive statements. Rephrase. "I hope you don't have to. For your sake, not just mine."

"Nah. With shit like that there's always an alternative. I could have faked drinking too much with the journalist and fed her the same misinformation. I could have bearded myself in public with any number of escorts and weaseled out of the act with some sob story about my kid and my wife and my crushing guilt. I'll probably try some variation on that when I get back. It's too late to play the family-tragedy card, but I should be able to develop some plausible erectile dysfunction, cardiac problem that rules out the blue pill, whatever."

"That is a stupid amount of trouble to go to on my account," Daniel said -- uncomfortable, thinking that escorts might work, might be a baggage-free way for Jack to have something he _must_ still need --

"It's not on your account. I want this for me, same as I want it for you -- hell, same as I wanted you to fuck me on my back, and look how that turned out. First simultaneous orgasm. Congratulations, by the way."

"I couldn't have done it without you."

"Should've saved the rubber. Start a scrapbook."

"Ew?"

"Dry it out first. Press it in a book. You've gotta have a book around here somewhere." Jack pushed up on one elbow and looked down at him. "So you hear me, right? No recreational sidelines. By choice. Not a promise. Just a fact. That's how it is now. _It is not fun for me._"

"You love women," Daniel said, knowing the answer now, knowing the truth, still unable to let it go. Hearing the low anguish in his own voice and knowing that it wasn't at the idea that Jack still needed something he could never be, but at having to release a fundamental preconception. His grip on that belief about Jack -- that insecurity about himself, about them; that last excuse for not admitting what they had, what they were -- had been so tight that it was painfully hard to open his fingers. "You love women's bodies."

"I like looking at women's bodies. I like wet T-shirt contests. I like Jell-O wrestling. I like beach volleyball, I like the swimsuit issue, I like the Victoria's Secret fashion show. I like the visuals. I like jerking off to them. I like the _idea_. I won't stop liking those things. You, I love. You said it yourself. Those were two good years. We have a shot at a few more of those. How 'bout we go for it."

"It's not about love," Daniel said, foundering. "It's about _want_."

"Daniel," Jack said, as gently as Daniel had ever heard him speak. "I'll debate this with you as long as you need to. I'll do whatever it takes to ease your mind. But until we find some alien mind-meld gizmo you're gonna have to trust my word on this one, same as I'm trusting yours. I'm not sacrificing anything. What I did, I didn't do out of lust. I'm a grown-up, OK? I can like something without having to _have_ it. I made some mercenary choices based on a lot of unresolved shit that looks pretty well resolved now. What itches I have, I'm happy to scratch in front of the tube. I _prefer_ that. The only person I want to have real live sex with is you. It's that simple. It's as simple as what you said to me before."

"If you change your mind ... " Daniel said, his last gasp. "If you meet ... if there's someone ... "

"No," Jack said. "That's an _out_. A backdoor. You give me some blanket permission in advance, you're not taking me at my word. You're saying I don't know my own mind. If you don't believe me, tell me now. I meant it when I said whatever it takes."

"I believe you," Daniel said. He did -- he had since halfway through Jack's litany -- but as he said it out loud he felt something give way inside him. He was done struggling against this. He was done looking for excuses -- reasons to avoid committing to belief. Jack had told him once -- more than a year ago, on a day a lot like this, a day of arguments but without resolution -- that he believed too easily. That he'd spent most of a decade fighting one set of fake gods while he jumped at any chance to believe in other higher powers. Jack had been galled by the hypocrisy, years of anger and frustration welling up, shouting at him for everything from falling for Oma Desala to deifying the Ancients to praying with the locals on K'Tau. He'd listened in icy silence; he'd frozen Jack out. Within a few weeks his disillusionment with the Others had led him to conclude that Jack was right, but it was too late by then to tell him, the rift between them had grown too wide. Jack's affair with Kerry had begun and ended. They'd kept fucking but stopped talking; thinking back on it, now, he thought that the bitter exchange that day might have been the last substantive personal conversation they'd had before this. But Jack's point had settled in. He'd tried to stop being a sucker for belief. He'd even tried to tell him, the first time -- the only time -- Jack showed up in his office after he missed his ride to Pegasus. But he hadn't realized how thoroughly the sharp edge of that observation had cut him. How determined he'd become not to believe in anything at all.

He felt that dogged resistance inside him melt away -- like surrender, only the sweet kind, the kind that wasn't capitulation but profound relief -- and he looked at Jack, still up on one elbow, still waiting to see if there was a 'but' coming, and said, "You were right, that day. When you said there was only us -- not that first time, not on the sofa, I mean the day we got the gate off the Trust's al'kesh but the ship got away. That night, when we had the big blowout."

Jack's eyes narrowed, half wariness, half wince. "Said some nasty stuff that night."

"You called me some nasty things. The hyperbole was maybe a bit much. But you were right about me -- about how much I wanted to believe in something benevolent and powerful, some immanent sentience that would recognize our worthiness and reward it, guide us and aid us and pat us on the head when we got it right. You said there was only us -- only our strength, our weaknesses, our decisions good or bad. That we only had ourselves to rely on, and we had to be responsible for ourselves."

"I was just pissed at you for saying I should have given the order to fire."

"I know. I know that now. I mean, you were pissed about a lot more than that, that was the ... pardon the expression, trigger ... but I don't think I got it then. I was a little ... cavalier about my own safety. I didn't realize what I was putting you through. How bad it had gotten. I just want you to know that you were right. I never told you, and you should know that."

"You told me. In your office. That time I dropped by for lunch on the way to Peterson."

"I tried to. I didn't think you heard me."

"I heard you. I do listen, Daniel."

"Yeah." Daniel reached up, laid his hand on Jack's cheek -- felt a warm thrill of delight, still, after all these years, when Jack turned his face to press into it. "You do." He stroked his thumb along the line of cheekbone, then slid his hand down to Jack's neck. "Anyway, yes, I believe you. I believe _in_ you, too. I trust what you've told me. I'm willing to ... stake my heart on that." He felt his face soften into something close to a smile. "And I'll never hassle you about the objectification of women in your _Penthouse_ centerfolds again. Objectify away. Objectification is my friend."

Jack plumped down onto his shoulder, getting comfortable, scooching close. "Still want to hear that coping fantasy?"

Daniel's mouth twitched. "Only if it's hot. Not as a demonstration of a technique I expect to have a need to use." He let the smile off its leash, and Jack smiled back: trick question, right answer. "But it was the mechanism I was looking for, not the content. The actual fantasies, that's your own private thing."

"Hey, you're letting me into your head. Least I can do."

"Is that what all this was? Quid pro quo?"

"Maybe," Jack said. His gaze dropped, and he occupied his free hand stroking lazy eights around the knobs of Daniel's collarbone.

"You asked me to tell you what's going through my head when we're together, not what goes through my head when I masturbate in your absence, and your fantasy life isn't what I was talking about when I said I felt excluded. What I felt excluded from turned out not to exist. It was a construct. I'm over it." Absently, he added, "Well, getting over it. It's gonna take a while to metabolize everything that's ... " He tipped his head down, trying and failing to catch Jack's eye. "Hey. What's up?"

"I just wanted to tell you," Jack said. "I want to tell you." He took a breath, hesitated, and then said in a lower voice, "Sometimes it's torture because I want to tell you so _fucking_ badly and I can't begin to find the words."

They frequently dropped conversations midway through and picked them up again without preamble hours or days or weeks later. This whole day was really a continuation of -- the conclusion of, he hoped -- that year-old conversation. But Daniel had to cast back through several hours and several locations in the apartment before he found the antecedent for this. Then, for a moment, he was so moved he was at a loss for words himself. All of it, everything, this whole day, that whole night -- it hadn't just been Jack forcing words out for his sake. It had been for Jack's sake, too. Because Jack wanted him to know. Even when it was bitter, brutal anger. Even when it was terror and self-loathing and guilt. Even when it was the most private workings of his imagination and his libido.

Daniel moved closer, got his other arm under Jack and lifted his head for Jack's arm to slide under his neck, gently kissed Jack's lips. _I should definitely do this more,_ he thought. Not taking the initiative had become another way he pretended he wasn't asking anything, expecting anything. But the first touch of their mouths had been his doing. He could definitely do a lot more of that.

He let the physical contact do the comforting and soothing, let the press of skin express how much he was moved, and used spoken words to do the only thing he could do to help Jack finish what he seemed to need to get out: he asked questions.

"It really turns you on to imagine me with a woman?"

"It turns me on to imagine you getting excited," Jack said. His eyes opened and he kissed the fingers Daniel trailed over his lips. "Getting hot, getting off. I'm no good at imagining myself in stuff like that. Pretending I'm actually doing it, in my head -- that doesn't work for me. I watch you instead."

"And that helps you not feel so jealous?"

"It was what I could do with it. I hadda do something."

"So you don't pretend you're ... participating. You don't imagine that you're touching me or fucking me while I do this other person."

"Can't," Jack said.

"Are you even there? Are you in the scenario at all?"

"No. It's just happening. And before you ask, no I don't want to do that for real. I mean watch you doing that. I would if you asked me to, but I'd be miserable. It only works if it's a fantasy."

"That doesn't sound like voyeurism to me. It sounds like some kind of vicarity. You don't self-insert, at all, in your fantasy life?"

"Used to when I was a kid. Not anymore. Had my head fucked with too many times since then. I can't beat the meat and pretend it's your hand, either. I wish I could."

"That's why you like the visual aids."

"They work. My own hand works fine without 'em too -- just takes a little longer. And that fantasy about you works. That's my entire masturbation arsenal. Can't risk keeping toys around in case somebody tosses the place."

"So you don't fantasize about you and me."

Jack shook his head, a little ruefully. "Daydream sometimes. Think about you. Remember. That's just flashes."

"Like what?"

"Your ass in BDUs when you're bent over some half-buried whosis offworld. You on the end of my dick lying back with your arms over your head saying 'God Jack, fuck me, fuck me.' The way you used to look up at me when I came by your office, this half-second of pure happiness to see me before you shut it down and went all casual."

"I'm in love with you," Daniel said softly. "It's like that every time I see you. Every time."

He expected Jack to say _You hide it well_. He expected to have to apologize. But Jack just said, "Here too," and fell silent, and he understood that it _had_ been like that for Jack, all these years, just as much as for him, maybe more. Maybe it wouldn't have to be, so much, now. Or someday. Maybe Jack was thinking about that too.

After a while, he said, "I can fantasize about you for hours. About us, I mean. Imagining, remembering. Full-fledged encounters. I go to sleep doing that a lot of nights. It's ... nice. But it's lonely. Frustrating. I don't -- well, you know I don't always fall asleep right after I come. As bad as it is to lie there thinking when you're next to me, it's a lot worse when you're not."

"Yeah, I hear you. Bed's still empty. Still wish I could sustain something like that for long enough to get off, at least. That fantasy ... it's the closest I can get. You and someone else. How titanically fucked up is that?"

"I don't know. It's weird, but the shit we've been through, if that's, you know, the worst ... You're visualizing me and someone you saw in some surveillance stills?"

"No. Christ, no. What you said before, that's more what I do -- I make a construct. You and Generic Female. Couldn't even tell you skin color, hair color ... those details aren't there."

"But you play a whole scene in your head."

Embarrassment hardened Jack's face and voice, and he said, fast and harsh, "Stripping, foreplay, entry, fucking, orgasm, whole nine yards." Then his expression eased into wryness: "It kinda breaks up around the orgasm."

"Yeah, ejaculation'll do that to ya."

"Well, yeah. But I don't ... " He sighed. "The cuddling-afterwards thing -- I can't go there."

"I don't cuddle."

"Aw, c'mon --- you try to burrow right through me sometimes."

"That's you. Unique to you. I'd hold Sarah when she tucked in but I couldn't sleep that way, and Sha'uri didn't wrap around, she was like a cat, she'd just curl up against me, and I don't cuddle casual partners. I'm kind of an asshole about that."

"Really?" Jack said, genuinely surprised.

"Really," Daniel said, giving a gentle squeeze -- proof, or demonstration, or something. "I think this construct of yours might be a little idealized."

"You don't find the whole thing a little _disturbing_?"

"I don't think the fantasy's disturbing. It's disturbing that you can't comfort yourself with your own imagination anymore, whether or not I can be there in reality to obviate the need for it. I don't know what to say about that except ... maybe we can develop some alternatives." He smiled: "There has to be a better way."

"Like what?" Jack said, close to smiling back, not quite there.

"Like ... OK, I know there's no phone encrypted enough to make phone sex safe for you, but we could establish some kind of code for communicating the basics like 'I placed this particular call because I'm horny and I want you to talk to me while I jerk off' and 'I'm touching myself now, keep talking' and 'I'm about to come' and 'Mission accomplished.' I could get off very easily just listening to your voice."

The smile broke through. "Likewise," Jack said. "And since you suck at keeping the noise down, your code for 'about to come' is 'hang on, call waiting' and you put me on hold while you shout my name."

"I am not that noisy."

"You are when your mouth's _right up against my ear_."

"Which I guess it kind of is, on the phone."

"Which is why that idea gets a big honkin' stamp of approval. Got any more?"

"Well, nobody can dictate to your libido, but I did actually mean what I said before -- if you like fantasizing about me and you can't imagine yourself into the scene, then you could try that fantasy with a toy or just my hands instead of the other person. And the knowledge that _I'm_ imagining _you_ while I'm doing it. Lying back with a vibrator inside me going 'God, Jack, fuck me, fuck me.'"

The heated prickle in Jack's skin answered for him, but he said, "That's a good substitute. I think I can work with that."

"So you'll give it a whack."

Getting Jack to laugh was like taking a really good drug, an all-in-one happy pill and muscle relaxant and stimulant.

"Yeah," Jack said. "I'll do that." He bent his head and left a soft kiss on Daniel's mouth, so brief it was all aftertingle, the remembrance of a kiss held in his lips while he watched Jack's lips move, form words, touch other parts of him. "Thanks, Daniel." He leaned over and kissed a nipple, brushed his lips around it, feather-light.

Daniel stopped him with a touch of fingertips before he worked his way down to blow him. "Stay up here. Stay with me."

Jack came up with a small, close-pressed smile. "Can you spare me long enough to do some rummaging in your bedstand?"

Rethinking who inaugurated the toys Daniel bought and then could never bring himself to use. Later or tomorrow was plenty of time for that. Later there'd be phone calls to tell people he was in town, to set up the meeting with Mitchell; tomorrow there'd be Italian food with the old team; but there'd still be time for them, time for that. Daniel lifted his hand to shape it to Jack's collarbone, the soft hollow of his throat, the curve of his neck. Right now he needed skin. "Rather have you."

Jack immediately pushed in, wrapping him in arms and legs and warmth, gently nuzzling his face with nose and lips. When Jack got affectionate, it was engulfing, melting, irresistible. It was usually spontaneous. It had never occurred to Daniel that he could solicit it. "You've got me," Jack said in his lowest voice, the one that sounded like whiskey burn in his throat, and touched lips with him, teasing with soft feints and slow tilts as if he were searching out the best angle, breathing Daniel's mouth open. Daniel's penis twitched helplessly, and his eyes slid closed. Jack ran a hand down his back to cup his ass, and gently squeezed one cheek away from the other. His forefinger flirted lightly with Daniel's hole while his lips flirted with Daniel's mouth. The combination of tenderness and tease made Daniel's whole body contract. _God, I want you_, his mind said, and a high moan threaded through his closed throat. Jack murmured into his lower lip, his upper lip: "You've got me coming ... and going," stroking the pad of his finger dry over the pursed lips between his parted cheeks.

Daniel's arms were tight around Jack's waist, the lower one probably jamming uncomfortably into his kidney, and his pelvis was pressed tight against Jack's, reflexively rubbing, trying to rub them both hard. He wanted skin on skin, he wanted erections mashed between them, bodies sweating with the exertion it took to get off that way, he wanted one of them on top, he wanted grinding weight. He wanted to have to work for it. He wanted Jack to hold him down and strangle him with his tongue and force him to come. He wanted to hold Jack down and make Jack swallow his groans while he ground himself into orgasm on Jack's body. At the same time, and just as intensely, he wanted gentleness, a relaxing massage, a quiet all-the-time-in-the-world closeness. He wanted grinding sex and engulfing affection and heart-melting tenderness. He wanted all of it, all at once, skin and bone and Jack and love. _This is what I want,_ he thought, rubbing, kissing, squeezing with all the strength in his arms. _This is all I want. This. You._

Jack was pushing back now, a lot of weight, a lot of muscle. "Where the hell'd the lube go?" he said against Daniel's mouth, and Daniel realized he'd been groping around for it.

"Dunno," he gasped back. "Get the spare from the drawer."

Jack pushed into him harder, reaching for it. The drawer opened and didn't close. Jack flipped the cap one-handed, poured silken coolness over Daniel's ass cheek in a struck-through S, dropped the bottle without re-capping it, and lubed his hand in two wipes through the dripping S, front and back. He never let go of Daniel with the other arm; that arm was all hard bone and tensed muscle, all leverage, and the weight and strength of Jack's body was an unrelenting, insistent press, but the sweep of Jack's slippery hand up the crack was sweet and easy. His mouth had gone gentle -- his fascinating, infinitely malleable mouth, that could go from thin and hard to curled and sneering, from a thoughtful pout to a goofy grin, from bruising and dominating to soft and coaxing. He was coaxing again now, at both ends, with that iron arm holding Daniel tight in between. He slid his finger and his tongue in at the same time.

Daniel writhed. He sucked on Jack's tongue, clawed Jack's back. Jack shifted down to get more finger into him, and then he was thrusting into Jack's sticky abs and kissing down into Jack's mouth. He felt the pressure of his own cock against his belly and realized that the finger up in him had gotten him about half-hard. That was probably why Jack had wanted to pull out a toy -- because they were still well inside his usual refractory period and Jack could feel his whole body straining for an erection and there was no way he was messing with what he'd done the last time Daniel's cock wasn't ready when Daniel was. The finger probed deeper, turning inside him. The stimulation twinged through his groin; even with lube, the friction of skin on sensitive tissue spread heat through his pelvis, down into his thighs.

Jack closed the kiss back into a press of lips and said, "Trust me, let me," and Daniel gave a _No, stay, this is so good_ moan, and Jack said, "I won't go far. I won't go all the way down." Daniel said "OK," and Jack moved lower. His mouth slipped away from Daniel's and closed on Daniel's throat. Daniel lifted his chin to make room, felt Jack's face tilt and his head settle against the mattress, under the valley between the pillows. The shift of bodies settled Daniel's cock into the valley between Jack's ribs, the soft channel in the cage of bone protecting Jack's chest cavity -- an intense turn-on, as if he was fucking Jack's heart. He swallowed hard, and Jack's tongue explored the movement of cartilage. Lips riding his Adam's apple, Jack murmured, "This is what you wanted, right? Skin on skin?"

"Yes," he said, and threaded his fingers into Jack's soft hair. "Yes." Jack's arm around his lower back locked him in, tight and close. Jack's long finger pushed into him down to the knuckle, hitting a spot up past the prostate that made him go weak and trembling, and he said "Oh _god_ yes" and tried to curl around him without straining Jack's hold. He could feel Jack's heartbeat. He could feel his penis swell up rigidly between them, feel the throb of his own pulse against his abs. The slightest push of his hips rubbed tender flesh over hardness -- the hardness of Jack's chest, the hardness under his own skin.

It was good, so good, so close, all the right smells nestling in the sheets around them, rising up on the heat from their bodies, Jack's pillow under his head, Jack's hair and scalp and skull under his hand, the serenity of evening bluing the window shades, the rich promise of night beyond. It got better as Jack fed more fingers into him, pistoning slow and hard, driving him to rub and thrust inside the iron encirclement of arm. Jack sucked on his throat, pushing into the resistance of his arm, pushing into him as if he couldn't get close enough, deep enough. Jack drank in his moans through the vibrations in his larynx, breath and spit hot and wet on his neck. He thrust up harder, ass clenching around the pressure of fingers, and the head of his cock rubbed into chest hair, a scritchy spike of stimulation right on the sweetest, tenderest spot. He jerked uncontrollably, gasping, and then did it again, on purpose, and Jack groaned "Fuck, Daniel, yeah, _yeah_" and crushed him into his thundering heartbeat, his heaving chest.

The surge of Jack's arousal pushed him over. He came stroking Jack's head, flooded with unbearable, hungry tenderness, his senses saturated with Jack's skin, Jack's smell, flesh and bone and heat and pounding blood, his semen soaking them, Jack's groans soaking them, Jack's supple fingers flexing and circling deep in his ass, massaging into the spasms of muscle, intensifying the orgasm to the point where his voice started to break on its own outcries -- then easing off, easing out to gently stroke and soothe. Jack's ravenous mouth went soft and tender and kissed up into the softness under his jaw, the lock of Jack's arm eased into a cradling support; he stilled his hand and cupped Jack's head before his compulsive petting became an irritation, and then huffed out a breathy, exhausted laugh and took up a gentle rub with his thumb when Jack made a sound of _hey, I was liking that_ protest. Between his belly and Jack's chest, his balls felt deliciously spent, deflated, but his softening penis was still hypersensitized, and their combined breathing sent electric shivers of aftershocks through his groin.

Already as close as he could physically be, Jack nuzzled in with a contented sigh. Daniel got his lower arm out from under Jack's shoulder and wrapped it around Jack's neck, hooked his leg over Jack's hip, gently pressed the back of his head -- holding him, squeezing him. Jack made a low sound against his neck, and his body, which had felt completely relaxed, released a tension that Daniel hadn't known was there, melting into the embrace of his limbs.

_You need me to hold you,_ Daniel thought. He blinked in soft amazement, and squeezed, and stroked. _God. I never knew._

All this time, Jack must have thought that this was something he did only with women, and something he wanted from Jack only when he was the one being held, when he was the one burrowing into safety and comfort. All these years, all the times and all the ways Jack had made himself utterly vulnerable in bed, and he'd never known that this was something Jack would like -- something Jack would welcome, or seek out, or ... need. All the times they'd sprawled across each other, boneless after explosive sex, and he'd never done this simple thing: pressed Jack's head into his chest or the hollow of his neck, closed his arms around him, held him.

"Whatcha thinkin'?" Jack said, a soft, undemanding muffle.

"How much I love you," Daniel said quietly. "How much I don't know about you. How much I love this. Holding you like this."

Jack's slow, resting heartbeat sped up a little, and Daniel felt the brush of lashes as his eyes opened. "Yeah?"

"Yes. Seriously. Very much."

Jack closed his eyes again and inhaled Daniel's scent, exhaled relief. "Glad," he said. "Thought it might blow the whole ... " He finished with a grunt, because he didn't have the words for whatever conception he had of what made him attractive to Daniel, but it was moot now and didn't matter.

After a while Daniel said, "But speaking of blowing ... "

Jack smiled against his neck. "Nowhere near getting it up yet. Not even with oral assistance."

Smiling back, Daniel echoed, "Erections aren't everything."

"_This_ is everything," Jack said. "This right here. Everything I need."

"Me too," Daniel said softly, stroking -- pushing away his awareness of the chill seeping in around them, the building whose management was too tightfisted to put the heat on this early in the season, the cascade of figurative associations that set off in his head; all that lay beyond this embrace of ephemeral flesh. But Jack's lube-tacky hand on his ass made him conscious of Jack's come-tacky chest and belly, and he said, "You probably want a shower, though."

Jack's chuckle was a warm, delicious vibration he felt from his chin down to his groin. With slow, drowsy deliberation, Jack kissed into his neck -- twisting to nail the sweetest spot -- and then settled his head back comfortably where it had been and said, "I so, so don't. We're naturally adhesive, remember? No more dissolving the glue."

"I guess I'm never living that metaphor down," Daniel said, even though Jack had started it.

"Not in this lifetime," Jack said, with a sticky squeeze.

Daniel reached over and grabbed as much blanket as he could to pull around Jack, since it seemed that they weren't going anywhere for a while, and Jack did the same, dragging enough extra sheet out from its tuck to get him covered. Then Daniel pulled back just enough, against Jack's protesting growl, to tip his chin down, and he pushed Jack's chin up with his free hand, and he took Jack's mouth -- with lips and jaw and tongue, slowly levering it open, filling it, sinking into it as deep as he could go; not a thought in his head except for _Jack. Jack. Jack._


End file.
